The divas who made drunken George Best look like a model chat show guest
Raquel Welch in a strop and Vanessa Redgrave storming off, Terry Wogan’s memoirs recall . . .
American celebs were either glazed over or hyperactive Neil Kinnock threw a wobbly; Madonna insisted I flew to her
HE WAS the radio and TV star millions saw as their friend — and who now mourn his loss. On Saturday, the Mail began an exclusive serialisation of Terry Wogan’s warm-hearted and revealing memoirs with his life in Forties Limerick. Today, he gives his rollicking and very mischievous account of his days hosting his hugely successful TV chat show . . .
ALESSER man, with a more sensitive psyche, might have been shattered by the reaction to my first foray as a TV presenter with my own primetime show. ‘The concept of the game is negligible,’ carped one critic, ‘the prizes insignificant and the sight of the lad himself in loose charge of one of the most unbelievably bad quiz shows on television is more than flesh and blood can stand.’
‘This genuinely horrible concept,’ wrote another, ‘is a success, and we have Wogan to blame for it. It would be worth a lot of money to know how he does it. He is not good-looking, but he looks as if he hopes to be, one day.’
Honestly, am I supposed to have no feelings at all?
The year was 1979 and the show, of course, was Blankety Blank, in which I waved around a thin, tubular microphone while celebrities tried to guess words and contestants strove to win a chequebook holder and pen. For me, it was the tackiness of the prizes that gave the show its flavour. A mug-tree, for goodness’ sake. A plastic bike, and a star prize of a weekend in Reykjavik. As I write, I dash away a manly tear at the sheer munificence of it.
Stars flocked to appear, but we always found a place for three special people: actress Beryl Reid, DJ Kenny everett and gameshow host Larry Grayson. I don’t know why Beryl took such a smack to me; she could be temperamental with others. She played the game absent-mindedly, Larry played with camp disdain and Kenny bent my mike whenever I was foolish enough to get too close to him.
I work best when I’m with people I love and admire, people I am proud to call my friends. So it was a source of chagrin in the Seventies that the BBC kept switching radio producers on me. They had the extraordinary idea that a producer and his charge should not become too close — friendship might inhibit his ability to discipline the presenter. That’s barking mad.
But I did have real friends with me every day: my loyal listeners. They f ormed themselves i nto groups, starting with the IDIOTS (I Dream Incessantly Of Terry Society). Then there were the TWINKLETOES (Terry Wogan Is Not Kinky Like everyone Thinks Or everyone Says), and the TWITS (Terry Wogan Is Tops Society). Finally, they were all amalgamated into the TOGS (Terry’s Old Geezers and Gals).
The trappings of fame came thick and fast. I stood for two hours, clutching my Blankety Blank microphone, at Madame Tussaud’s, while they photographed me from every angle. Then they moulded my image in wax. I gave them a spare suit, shirt, tie, socks and shoes, and it looked nothing like me.
Still, I fared better than the Royal Family, who looked like refugees, their regal finery straight out of Oxfam’s window. And if you think these are the rantings of an embittered man whose waxen image now graces a shelf in the back room of dear old Madame’s, you may be right.
In 1982, I began my TV chat show — first on Saturday nights, and soon thrice-weekly at teatime. It was a success from the start, with unprecedented viewing figures that often topped ten million.
I am not a believer i n taped, meticulously edited talk shows. A talk show is a piece of cheap light entertainment. Compared to a sitcom or a drama, it costs next to nothing. The whole point, it seems to me, of doing a talk show is for the spontaneous, unexpected moment. And, yes, even for the embarrassed pause and the trance-like stare.
However, exceptions must prove the rule. No one in their right mind would ever have attempted to interview Oliver Reed live, and Freddie Starr was another who could only be saved by the tape-editor’s razor blade.
I’m proud of the Wogan show. We did it live, at peak viewing time, for three nights every week for almost nine years, with viewing audiences that they’d die for these days. Still, I accept that chat show hosts are never remembered by their triumphs, but by their disasters. No one ever let me forget George Best, drunk as a skunk, or Anne Bancroft’s dumb act.
I think of my interview with film star Anne as my Nightmare Of Shepherd’s Bush. I later found out she was furious because we’d used a sexy still from her movie, The Graduate. But since she spent much of that film in bra and pants in the bedroom, please don’t expect me to excuse her extraordinary, unprofessional behaviour on that account.
I began by saying: ‘ I had the pleasure of interviewing your husband, Mel Brooks (the actor and director), about four years ago. He told me that I had to talk to you.’
Anne fixed me frostily and, at last, asked why.
‘Because he said that you’re his inspiration,’ I suggested.
‘That’s not true,’ said Anne, flatly. So I asked whether the converse was true, whether he helped and inspired her. ‘No.’ Another long pause. ‘We barely see each other, to tell you the truth.’
We struggled on, until I asked a candid question: ‘ Why do you hate this kind of interview so much? Is it me?’ Probably, said Anne.
‘Do you do this kind of thing in the States?’ I wondered. No, said Anne. ‘Are you glad you did this?’ I asked, more in hope than expectation. No, said Anne. What else was there to add? ‘Thank you, Anne Bancroft,’ I said, and waited in vain for the ground of W12 to swallow me up.
Paradoxically, I have always felt that the best, most spontaneous interview I conducted was with the brilliant Mel Brooks. But no one remembers that.
There were other frissons. I remember well Raquel Welch getting into a right two-and-eight about something. I’ve a vague recollection that she wanted to be taken seriously, not all that easy in view of her previous form in a fur bikini in the prehistoric romp One Million Years BC.
I do recall her telling me that she was married to a renaissance man. I believe she and Leonardo da Vinci parted soon afterwards.
And I will always remember the pleased expression on the face of Chevy Chase, a big American comic-turned-movie star. Whenever I asked him a question he would smile benevolently and wink roguishly at the studio audience, but not a word came from his lips. Obviously that was enough to reduce American audiences to hilarity, but our lot were bemused.
The milder question would set certain people off in a strop. Neil Kinnock threw a wobbly for no particular reason that I could discover. Michael Heseltine stormed off after the credits rolled, letting the producer have a mouthful in his patrician way (though I always think of Tory grandee Alan Clark’s description of Heseltine as ‘a man who had to buy all his own furniture’).
Vanessa Redgrave just got up in the middle of a show and left. Bored, I suppose. There were others I wished would leave, since they sat there like stuffed dummies — I’m bound to say this mostly happened with American film stars whose eyes had already glazed over during make-up.
I’ve never been able to decide if I preferred my American celebrities to be glazed or, because whatever they had ingested was having the opposite effect, hyperactive.
There are few things more disconcerting than an interviewee doing handsprings in the middle of a conversation, as the wonderful but exhausting Robin Williams tended to do.
In 1988, we took the whole shebang to America for Wogan In Hollywood.
My wife Helen and I lounged about the pool of the St James Hotel, high in the hills of Tinseltown, looking down on the smoke-enshrouded city of LA. Then, of an early evening, we would repart to the TV studios where, before a studio audience who hadn’t the smallest notion who the guy with the funny accent was, I recorded two shows a night. An American audience would applaud a fly crawling up a
wall if instructed, but such was the strength of the line-up they needed no encouragement.
Bob Hope, Cyd Charisse, James Caan, the Golden Girls, the denizens of supersoaps Dynasty and Dallas and Harrison Ford were reward enough — though Ford, a charming man, delivered most of his replies from behind his hand. He’s one of the shyest people who I have ever interviewed.
That’s not a fault you could ever level at comedian Bob Hope, who insisted on whatever he was selling being mentioned in the first ten seconds. When we’d finished the recording, he took over the studio to record a charity appeal — a bonus that he’d insisted upon as a condition of the show. No flies on Bob.
It was always the stars, or their managers and agents, who dictated the terms, which was why we were forced to fly to Cannes for Madonna and to Nashville for Dolly Parton. Don’t you be thinking these were mere junkets I arranged for myself. I didn’t have the clout.
For a little while, mind you, I was earning more than mere respect. And that got me into a spot of bother, when Question Time presenter Robin Day heard what I was supposed to be getting in my weekly wage packet.
He’d been in a fine fit of pique over the salary he received from the BBC and burst into print, dragging my name all over the papers with him. Michael Grade, Controller of BBC One, decided Day should come on the Wogan show so we could have a proper dust-up. I didn’t like the idea and I was right. The late lamented Sir Robin had spent most of his life bullying, blustering and shouting opponents down, and I was no match for him
When the show was over, he was sweetness and light — as he had been on a previous appearance, when he made a point of declaring how much better I was than Michael Parkinson.
I put the blessed Parky’s name in full there, just to show that we’re pals and I know what his first name is. One of the more hurtful, yet perceptive, letters I have received pointed out that those whom the British public revere are known universally by their first names — Elton, Cilla, Ant and Dec, John, Paul, George and Ringo. Those held in little regard, not to say disgust, are known by their surnames: Hitler, Crippen, every prime minister since Winston, every England football manager since Alf, not to mention De Gaulle, Mussolini . . . . and, dammit, Wogan.
Still, it didn’t stop me getting an invitation to Buckingham Palace to celebrate the music industry’s contribution to the public purse. I got there early and was ushered through one great room after another.
Gradually, my personal palace salon began to fill up with other people — Shirley Bassey (who knocked over an occasional table in her nervousness), Phil Collins, lyricist Tim Rice, Vera Lynn . . . then Her Majesty entered and the Duke, and they began moving slowly down the line, exchanging pleasantries.
When the Queen came to me, she told me how much she enjoyed the music of singer Katie Melua and complimented me on discovering and promoting such a talent.
I blushed modestly, but didn’t have time to explain to Her Majesty that the discovery had been made by my producer, Doctor Wally, because with that charming smile of hers, she had moved on to exchange badinage with Phil Collins.
Moments later, she and the Duke l eft. As they did, Phil Collins whistled the theme from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
The Queen turned, still smiling, but puzzled. ‘What was that?’ she asked. Poor Phil was speechless.
‘He was calling E.T., Ma’am,’ I said, wishing even as I said it that I’d kept my mouth shut. He Majesty just nodded, as if she understood. They’d obviously warned her about the kind of eejits she’d be meeting that evening.
That was, I told Phil later, a prize example of the Royal Effect: ‘You say the first thing that comes into your head, and you carry the memory of your foolishness with you to the grave.’
Speaking of Her Majesty, many years ago a doddering old geezer named Jimmy Young would wheel his mobile commode into my radio studio and, unbidden, rattle off in a wheezy baritone the supposed
highlights of his programme later that morning. Every week, I would cling to the forlorn hope that his wheels would come off or the monkey-gland injections would fail, but then came dreadful news: the Queen had given the old bloke a gong.
The following day he walked in, virtually unaided, and pointed to the medal swinging against his chickenbone chest. ‘It’s the OBE,’ he chortled, before going into a paroxysm of coughing.
I congratulated him between gritted teeth, but when he revealed that Her Majesty listened to our daily badinage, I could contain myself no longer.
‘Why didn’t I get a royal commendation as well?’ I demanded. Jimmy chuckled and wheezed, and sat down till the coughing fit subsided. ‘ Har-har!’ he gloated. ‘The Queen says it’s the bit of my programme she enjoys best.’ His programme? It was always my show that provided the backdrop to these eloquent jousts.
Was the House of Windsor not even aware of my contribution? There was no time to vent my spleen. We were on air, a record was spinning to its close and I had to address my public as though I had not a care in the world. At moments like that, I was grateful for the sole piece of useful advice Jimmy Young had ever given me. ‘Always remember, lad,’ he said, ‘don’t bleed in front of the men.’
They don’t make ’em like that any more.
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.