Eurovision and the jibe that made me Public Enemy No1
By Terry Wogan
AS LUCk had it, I landed a berth at the Beeb just in time to be part of the famous photo featuring all the Radio 1 DJs on the day the station launched.
Before long, I was standing in for Jimmy Young, and then presenting my own afternoon show. Becoming the BBC commentator for the Eurovision Song Contest seemed a natural progression.
Ah, the glamour. One year during the Seventies, the organisers decided that a capital turn for the interval would be a clown act. And guess who was doing the commentary for BBC radio?
Ten minutes of silence to fill. It doesn’t sound much but, trust me, it’s a lifetime in front of a microphone when all you have to describe is a crowd of capering eejits in baggy trousers, huge feet and red noses, falling over each other.
The contest took me to almost every country in Europe and, latterly, deep into Asia. But the most exciting occasions always came after the Irish had won, and so claimed the right to stage it, once again, in Dublin. By the nineties, it seemed Ireland could win at will, with acts such as Linda Martin, niamh kavanagh and the rest.
Whenever Ireland were hosts, I liked to arrive in style, so I would call a Dublin taxi driver named Michael Devine. Up to our hotel would roar limos with a full police escort.
They’d transport us at breakneck speed through narrow streets and backroads, ignoring red lights, pedestrians and other road users alike, till we arrived at the Point, the theatre where the Eurobusiness was being staged. As we alighted onto the red carpet, Michael would slip the sergeant in charge a handful of crisp oncers. And the bikes would scream away to the Park, the official residence of the Irish President, for their next engagement . . . an official one, not just moonlighting for Michael.
It could be a long time before Ireland, or Great Britain for that matter, wins again. The voting has always been skewed by petty national prejudices, but since the former Soviet bloc were admitted, the contest is no long about music, and all about keeping your allies sweet.
Still, anybody who takes even a passing interest (and it’s probably wise to take no more than that) will know that Eurovision is an impossible dream. How can anyone reared on the shores of the Caspian, or in the shadow of the Carpathians, possibly share the same musical traditions as someone from the banks of the Seine or the foothills of the Alps?
It was bad enough in the old days, having to cope with the French idea of pop music (Johnny Hallyday and Plastic Bertrand) or the German (oompah bands), the Spanish (frills, flamenco and flounce) or the Portuguese (sunshine and sad sailors), but at least we knew where we stood.
Well, with one exception: you never quite knew what you’d get from the Italians. They see themselves as the pre-eminent European nation of music, and take umbrage at being down among the also-rans.
I remember when the contest was staged in Rome, in 1991. We were all bussed to the location, the Cinecitta film studios.
The set seemed to be constructed out of rusty tin plate, but when I pointed this out I was assured it would look like marble. On the big night, it looked just like rusty tin.
Still, the show was a triumph — television that could make you wince in pain, laugh out loud or throw things at the set, but never bore you.
OnE thing I do regret is the passing of the live orchestra, with each country providing a conductor. nowadays the backing track is all over the show like a cheap suit, and it led to the downfall of one British act, Jemini. Poor Gemma Abbey, one half of the duo, couldn’t match her vocals to the beat of the drum machine, and Royaume-Uni earned the shame of nul points in 2003.
I came something of a cropper myself in 2001 when the contest travelled to Denmark.
The Danes, determined to prove themselves the most innovative country in Scandinavia even if they are the smallest, held it in a cavernous football stadium with vodka vendors in every aisle and a stage so far away that I might have had as good a view from my hotel window. (A far cry from the Gaiety, the Dublin music hall that was the backdrop for my very first Eurovision in 1971.)
Up came the Euro-anthem, and on came the presenters, who immediately started talking in rhyming couplets.
This quaint conceit quickly lost its charm for me, and I started to poke fun — not, you might think, an unusual occurrence — dubbing them ‘ Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy’. Sometimes, to vary things, I called her the Little Mermaid.
The following morning, I rose to my herring and croissant to find myself reviled as Denmark’s public enemy no 1. not to put too fine a point on it, their newspapers were spitting blood.
My comments were taken as a slap in the face to the Danes, nay, to all that was best about Danish life.
You see, not only do small countries have delusions about their own importance but they also have inferiority complexes.
The Danes, like the Irish, will ask on your arrival: ‘What do you think of our beautiful country?’ And the answer had better not be in the negative. All of Denmark took my gentle banter as a foul slur on their nationhood, and I had to be smuggled down the Skaggerak under trawler nets.
Fortunately, I had another means of earning a living: blathering a lot of ould talk on the radio first thing in the morning.
People ask why I did it for so long — rising at half past five to gulp down a cup of instant coffee and forego a full breakfast in favour of a mango (eaten, of course, while standing naked in the sink, since otherwise every stitch of clothing would be covered in juice).
The reason is not just because I loved the fun and frolic, or the jolly bonhomie of my underlings, such as my producer Paul Walters, otherwise known as Dr Wallington P. de Wynter Courtney Claibourne Magillicuddy Walters, or Alan Dedicoat, alias Deadly Alancoat, the Voice of the Balls on the national Lottery.
Some say I only turned up for the muffins from the catering trolley, but this isn’t true: Doctor Wally would distribute them all to passing females in a desperate attempt to curry favour.
no, the real reason that I sat at the helm of the Radio 2 breakfast
extravaganza from 1972 to 1984, and again from 1993 till 2009, is that for a presenter on a major station, breakfast-time is the only game in town. It’s where the audience is.
Any presenter worth his salt should want the network’s flagship programme. Why else are you in the game, if not to be the biggest and the best?
The stakes are high, though: if the breakfast show is a bust, it’ll take the entire station to the grave with it.
When I returned to radio, following an eight-year sabbatical to present my thrice-weekly chatshow on teatime BBC1, I was well aware that I had to increase Radio 2’s audience. Anything else would be a failure.
So I recklessly declared that I aimed to add half a million listeners to the figures. If that happened, I thought privately, there would be no getting rid of me.
I did better than I’d hoped. A million extra listeners joined me, and then a million more, and by 2005 I had doubled the breakfast audience to eight million. Everyone knew, mind you, that even a suggestion of slippage would be like a taste of blood to the ravening wolves, and that headlines would immediately shriek: ‘Is This The End For Woe-Begone Wogan?’
ThAT kind of stuff, while burnishing the ego to a high gloss, should never be taken seriously. At the show’s height, I went into a Post Office, and the man behind the counter recognised me and summoned his wife. ‘ Oh, look who it is!’ she said brightly. ‘What are you doing here?’
I gestured to the letters in my hand. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘we don’t see or hear much of you, these days, do we?’
I mumbled something to the effect that I still got a little work when I could. ‘Oh, really? What do you do now?’
I don’t kid myself, that’s what I do. Nobody on radio and television leaves footprints in the sands of time. It’s debatable whether any ‘great’ man or woman does, outside of the history books. how often does Alexander the Great crop up in conversation? People for whom I’ve been a steady drone in the background of their lives may miss the familiarity of my voice for a week or two, but then it’s onwards and upwards with the next incumbent.
EXTRACTED from Mustn’t Grumble (Orion, £9.99) and Is It Me? (BBC, £7.99) by Terry Wogan. © Terry Wogan. The fee for this extract will be donated to The Rennie Grove Hospice, which specialises in end-of-life cancer care (renniegrove.org), and to Children In Need. Both books are available in ebook and audiobook. To order copies at the special price of £7.99 and £5.99 respectively (offer valid to February 20), call 0808 272 0808, or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P free on orders over £12.