Wogan knew how to make it seem easy

BACK when he used to present Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, Terry Wogan would tell his producer that he wasn’t going to get up at 5.30am not to have a laugh.

“It’s got to be fun,” Wogan said. “If we’re not having fun, then they [the listeners] won’t have fun.”

Fun was very much the tone set for a new documentary about the late broadcaster last Sunday night as Radio 2 celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first Terry Wogan Breakfast Show.

Wogan: In His Own Words was a mash-up of celebrity reminiscences alongside a previously unheard interview with the man himself. The programme took Wogan’s broadcasting genius for granted. Fair enough. But his path wasn’t always a smooth one, as Ken Sweeney’s RTE drama Wogan’s Sweet Sixteen, which aired towards the end of last year, pointed out. Five decades ago, having an Irish accent on the radio at the height of the IRA bombing campaign on the mainland was not always an easy gig. But Wogan persevered and then prospered because he was very good at what he did. And Wogan: In His Own Words took that idea as its mission statement.

“The two most important characteristics and qualifications for working in TV and radio and broadcasting are empathy and curiosity,” Dermot O’Leary suggested at one point. “You have to have both, and I think Terry had them in spades.”

Wogan also made broadcasting seem easy. Maybe because it was to him. Jeremy Vine recalled once getting into a lift with Wogan at 7.28am one morning. Vine turned to the Irishman and said, “’Terry, you’re on the air in 30 seconds.’ And he replied ‘Yes, I’m early this morning.’”

The person who had the most

interesting things to say about Wogan was Wogan himself. “A lot of people in our business are introverted and shy or have an illusion that they are introverted and shy,” Wogan said at one point. “But radio is the medium for the introverted egomaniac anyway. And that’s what I suppose I am.”

Why should any of this matter, you might ask? He was just a DJ, after all. Wogan had an answer for that argument.

“There’s nothing more intrinsically worthwhile in reading the news than there is in presenting a quiz programme,” he argued. “There is nothing more worthwhile in being Robin Day than there is in being me, just because what Robin Day does is serious and what I do is trivial. If one thinks in terms of how much one has contributed to the sum of human happiness, or something as pretentious as that, I would say

that Robin Day and I come out about level.”

Frankly, I find that hard to argue with. Over on Radio 4 Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders are back together in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane Austen? David Quantick’s sitcom on Friday mornings.

Saunders plays Selena, a pasther-best movie star, while French is Florence, a writer desperate for attention. In yesterday’s episode they were both nominated for a book prize. Cue loads of literary name-dropping, Alistair McGowan doing very creditable impersonations of the Reverend Richard Coles and Ken Bruce and Jennifer Saunders getting to say the deathless line, “Are these the breasts of a writer?”

And how many comedies are able to use the AS Byatt/ Margaret Drabble feud as a punchline? Not enough, quite frankly.

Radio 2 celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first Terry Wogan Breakfast Show