It wasn’t like Terry Wogan to wake you up with bad news like that, though there were days when the news was very bad indeed. Either the IRA had been doing their damnedest or Princess Diana had died. He ignored the IRA. Of Diana he just said simply: “Those poor boys.”
Like the daily sun, he brought disinfecting warmth. Even the word Togs, theoretically Terry’s old gals and geezers, suggests enveloping warmth.
He started life, like PG Wodehouse, as a bank clerk, but the moment he picked up a mic he knew he could do it. “Never mind the music, it’s the talking that’s important,” he once said insouciantly, while treading all over the Grateful Dead.
And, like Wodehouse, he created a world of his own, in which traffic cones bred like rabbits, hens wore miner’s lamps in winter, oil barons had budgie feathers in their stetsons and, in the corner of some unspecified Irish hooley, a woman in a bed called insistently for more porter. And got it.
As we all know, the pictures are better on radio and it favours the ricocheting Irish imagination, which goes off unprogrammed and ping-pongs exuberantly around the place ending up about anywhere. Or never ending at all.
Well, you never miss your mother till she’s buried neath the clay. Or, as Wogan also said a bit bitingly about the BBC: “We should have made more of it while we had it.” To quote the skipper in one of his easy-to-tease sea shanties: “We’ve drunk the barrel dry.” There is very little left now of that intoxicating vintage.
And one other thing. He didn’t turn out to be a terrible crook in the end, blasting your laughter. He really was the way he sounded. How’s about that!
