The Togs, Terry’s Old Geezers and Gals, such as King Tog, Helen Bach, Dibley, Lucy Quipment, Ricky T Outhouse and Jo King who met at a Togs convention, will feel that they have lost family.
Any other broadcaster might have regarded the most obsessively devoted fans in the history of radio as stalkers, but Wogan shared their terrible jokes, celebrated their birthdays, ate the cake they sent in by the barrowload, laughed at their misfortunes, sang to their babies, talked to their cats, and beamed from ear to ear as they turned up whenever he opened so much as an envelope.
The Queen on a visit to Radio 2, and her daughter-in-law Camilla at a literary reception at St James’s Palace, both outed themselves as Togs.
The Togs were already organising their next annual convention, to be held in Reading next August, and were confident that this year their hero would walk among them again: in retrospect it was an ominous indicator when he had to cancel last time.
In 2009 on a freezing December morning they gathered on the doorstep of Radio 2, to mark what he announced on air with a wobble in his voice as “the day I’ve been dreading”: his last breakfast show. Dibley had come by overnight coach from Inverness, others from Yorkshire and south Wales.
As Wogan came out and greeted them with a shout of delighted recognition and an imperial two-armed salute, they comforted themselves that he would still be on the air: “He’s only moving from breakfast time to Sunday mornings, for heaven’s sake. It’s not as if the man is dead,” Lucy Quipment said.
The Togs won’t let a little thing like the fact that he has now passed affect their devotion.
