It’s hard to believe Terry Wogan died ten years ago. Aubrey Malone recounts the life, career and wit of one of the most successful broadcasters of our time
Terry Wogan died ten years ago. The son of a grocery shop owner, he was born in Limerick in 1938 and went to school in Dublin’s Belvedere College. While he was there he stayed with relatives in Sandymount. I used to think of him when I first came to Dublin, saying with my relatives in Sandymount, and attending “Belvo.”
Tel wasn’t too impressed with the beach at Sandymount. “You’d be half way to the Isle of Man,” he recalled, “before the water came up to your knees.” How true.
His first job was in the Royal Bank but, like Gay Byrne after him, he hankered for a way out of the nine-to-five pen-pushing. He left it to work in RTE in shows like “Jackpot.” I wonder how many “Senior Times” readers remember this. It was the show where the phrase “Stop the lights” entered the language. You have to a member of a very select club to remember “Stop the lights.” Some young people still say it today but most of them don’t know where it came from. You can google it if you like.
Terry commuted to England for joint work with the BBC when he was cutting his teeth in RTE, again like Gaybo. He took to it like a duck to water despite being, as he confessed, “painfully shy.”
As a child he’d hid behind the couch anytime he was asked to sing at a party. At dances he’d sit in the corner “waiting for someone ugly to ask me onto the floor.” This leads us to deduce that broadcasting, like acting, is the “shy man’s revenge.” He married someone anything but ugly in 1965. That was the model Helen Joyce, who died last year.
Afterwards Terry joined the BBC fulltime, hosting shows like the Eurovision Song Contest, which he professed to hate. It was hard to believe him. Like Gay with the Toy Show, it became a kind of pose.
Terry was a big hit over the pond, as we all know. One wonders if Ryan Tubridy could in our modern era. Maybe he’s not Oirish enough. Terry was able to send the Irish – and himself – up. It worked a treat. He warmed himself into the hearts of people with his affectionate blarney.
As time went on he expanded his repertoire, doing shows like “Children in Need” and “Blankety Blank” in the seventies and eighties.
The fact of him going to England wasn’t a surprise. He’d been fascinated by things English since childhood, as he related in his autobiography, immersing himself in programmes like “Mrs Dale’s Diary” and “Hancock’s Half Hour” amongst others. “I was a right little Brit,” he confessed.
He became something of an authority on the culture clash between the two countries. English reserve found its antithesis in Terry’s blathering. (Maeve Binchy noticed this too when she went there. When she started talking to people at bus stops, she said, “They gradually moved away from this mad woman with verbal diarrhoea.”)
“The main reason the English get on so well with the Irish,” Terry reflected once, “is that they don’t know from their accents whether they’re posh or common.” It’s an interesting thought. One would think Terry was posher than he was by his one, especially after it became anglicised.
Something else that differentiated the English from the Irish, Terry noticed, was their conception of time. He threw a lot of parties with Helen. Whenever he wrote on an invitation card that the starting time was nine, he was aghast to see people arriving at the door at precisely that time. He’d be just getting out of the bath.
Because he was Irish, nine meant ten or eleven, If the departure time was midnight, the Irish guests would only be warming up then. “An Irish person doesn’t know how to say goodbye,” he said. That’s also true. Our goodbyes often las longer than our visits.
Terry’s anglicisation would appear to have become complete by the time his Eurovision broadcasts started referencing the English as “we” instead of them. Okay, so he was living there and didn’t want to be schizoid. But did he have to make it so blatant? (Graham Norton did likewise in a later Eurovision era).
Terry didn’t come back to Ireland as much as one might have expected. “The country I left had an inferiority complex,” he said, “The one I came back to has a superiority one. It’s slightly less endearing.”
He went ahead in leaps and bounds in the Beeb but claimed never to be awed by it or blind to its faults. Its favourite maxim, he said once, was, “If it ain’t broken, break it.” But he loved doing “Wake Up To Wogan,” a show that made him the most listened-to broadcaster in Europe.
By the late 1970s it was commanding eight million listeners per morning. He tried not to let his head swell, saying, “Those who live by figures like that also die by them. Maybe there are eight million people listening to you but there are another 50 million that haven’t the foggiest who you are.” His remark makes it clear to us just how different the populations of both countries are. Ireland doesn’t even have eight million people in it altogether
Terry never got a big head. Maybe he wasn’t allowed to. On a trip back to the bank he worked in one year he ran into an old colleague who said, “You left at the wrong time. Do you remember Mick Murtagh? Well he’s manager in Timoleague now!” Terry’s reaction to this revelation hasn’t been documented.
“Wogan” was another show he did on the Beeb. It began in 1985 and ran for seven years. A half hour chatting to celebrities with wit and wisdom was gold in the ratings. He thrived on it. It ran until 1992. By that time he’d become tired of the formula.
He felt he’d done some good interviews but wondered if people noticed. “After seven years of chatter three times a week at peak time,” he reflected, “all that will probably be remembered is George Best being drunk as a skunk one night yakking on about how many women he bedded.”
Terry Wogan with his wife Helen who died last year
Terry was awarded an OBE in 1997. His bluff manner and refusal to take himself too seriously were still continuing to endear the public to him, and vice versa.
He also remained close to Helen. Their marriage stood the test of time in an industry when many others fell by the wayside. I’m sure Terry had many phone numbers of young beauties slipped into his pocket over the years at functions. He didn’t succumb.
On the 20th anniversary of his marriage in 2005 he wrote a card to Helen saying, ‘Happy anniversary to a woman who hasn’t changed since our wedding day. Iron your face and I’ll take you out on the town. Love, Ter.’
He took out dual citizenship that year. It was long overdue. He was also knighted. By now he’d become a “character,”, a man who wrote mildly funny books and who referred to his more senior listeners as TOGS (Terry’s Old Geezers).
In his later years he seemed to talk as much about food as anything else. As well as eating too much, he wasn’t the type to go to the gym. “Why should I exercise?” he pointed out, “The tortoise is the longest living animal.”
He started to show his age in the last years of his life. Book signings became arduous for him. In the old days he said he was in danger of getting repetitive strain injury from all the times he had to write his signature on books. With the advent of mobile phones that had cameras on them, he now risked lockjaw with all the smiling he had to do.
Terry had a horror of retirement. He pictured himself sitting around the house all day with his pipe and slippers watching re-runs of shows he did and saying to himself, “Was that really me?” Or in a supermarket following his wife around with a trolley and saying to her, “Why are we buying this?”
He did eventually retire, in 2009, but continued to dispense wisdom from the sidelines. This, as ever, was peppered with fun. He once said his maxim for a happy life was, “God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.”
He didn’t quite follow Helen round the supermarket during these years, squirreling himself away in his country mansion with her and his children instead. To people who called him a “legend” he said, “That’s a euphemism for “Past it” or “Forgotten but not gone.”
He died of prostate cancer on the last day of January, 2016. On his gravestone he said he wanted the following words to be written: “He didn’t know what he was doing.”
