R.I.P Sir Terry Wogan (1933 - 2016)
Someone commented recently on Twitter, Mark Gattis I believe it might have been, that 2016 has taken too much of our past already. For Brits, that has become even truer as news emerged last week that beloved broadcaster Sir Terry Wogan had passed away. I had no idea he even had cancer.
I don’t quite know how to explain Terry Wogan to people that don’t know who he is. He was one of our national treasures, a monolith of my past and of so many other people’s too. He was a long-time Radio 2 DJ whose breakfast show Wake Up to Wogan ran for over ten years before he did Weekend Wogan instead, both shows regularly scored enormous ratings and a hugely loyal fanbase, known as TOGS - Terry’s Old Gezzers or Terry’s Old Gals, until he retired in 2015. He presented a television chatshow Wogan (1982 - 1992) that amazingly and highly-successfully ran three times a week - unheard of for a chatshow in the UK, especially nowadays. He fronted hugely popular gameshow Blankety Blank (1979 - 1983). Most notably, from 1980 onwards he presented BBC’s Children In Need, a yearly telethon that raises so much money to help needy vulnerable UK children. While the evening’s ‘entertainment’ isn’t entirely for everyone (soap stars singing etc), the amount the telethon raises on a yearly basis is astonishing and it’s something Wogan felt very strongly about. He was the only celebrity ever paid a yearly fee for doing the telethon, a fee that was paid to him by the BBC and that he always donated to charity.
Tribute cartoon from The Telegraph newspaper - Pudsey, Children in Need's mascot, wearing a black eyepatch in tribute to Sir Terry rather than his usual polka-dot eyepatch.
He also, for 1971 to 2008, commentated for the UK during the yearly Eurovision Song Contest - if you’ve never seen it, my goodness, you need to. A yearly night of camp musical mania (usually marred by political voting so rarely do the songs that everyone likes win) and seriously good fun to watch if you’re willing to enter into the bonkers spirit. Wogan was able to make so many of us laugh as he sardonically observed the joyful weirdness on display. While Graham Norton does a wonderful funny job nowadays, Wogan is still the voice most people remember and quote.
He made me and my family laugh so often over the years. His was a wry but warm view of the world, cherished by so many. Tellingly, since his death, no stories have emerged of awful behaviour, nothing even remotely un-PC. All the stories have been of his generosity and his kindness and what a good friend he was, it’s been so wonderful to read and hear. He was enormously loved by friends, colleagues and fans alike. He gave so much to our island and was an Irish voice when that wasn’t the norm in the prominent mainstream media.
Here’s his goodbye when he stepped down from working on the breakfast show. Incredibly touching and classily done. Goodbye, Terry.
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