Terry Wogan made ordinary life special

If there was another Irish broadcaster who forced me to sit in the car park  and make me late for work it was Gay Byrne. Gay had a similar subversive streak and a light touch with a sting in the tail. But he did not  travel so well across the Irish Sea, nor did he aspire to.  Terry Wogan gave comfort  to millions by spreading the  word that  the struggles of daily life are shared far more widely than we thought, and at an hour when many of us needed a fix of encouragement  to go with the shot of caffeine.  In  Broadcasting House, in Maidenhead Berks.,  and on  innumerable  golf courses, he remained an Irishman from Limerick, but never one with an overdeveloped sense of  origins. It’s fair to say he managed to duck being drawn into the Troubles without attracting resentment.  It was the facility to treat fantasy like an old friend that was his most obvious Irish characteristic. This was noticed by that other sharpest of BBC insiders, the arts commentator Mark Lawson, writing in the Guardian.

 

He was a keen reader of Irish authors from James Joyce to William Trevor and, above all, Brian O’Nolan, the satirist and surrealist whose wild but jaunty tone Wogan knowingly adapted to the airwaves. Possessing a natural high intelligence – honed by education in Limerick and Dublin from Jesuit priests, the intellectual SAS of the Roman Catholic church – Wogan became one of the few presenters on radio music stations whose audiences routinely wanted the singers to shut up so that they could hear more of the host talking.

his two occupations of the Radio 2 morning slot, Wogan memorably applied a vital lesson – the benefit of building up a stock of catchphrases and characters – learned from O’Nolan, who wrote novels, including At Swim-Two-Birds, under the name Flann O’Brien, and whose newspaper columns, under the byline Myles na gCopaleen, Wogan had read when growing up.

We are reader supported. Donate to keep Slugger lit!

For over 20 years, Slugger has been an independent place for debate and new ideas. We have published over 40,000 posts and over one and a half million comments on the site. Each month we have over 70,000 readers. All this we have accomplished with only volunteers we have never had any paid staff.

Slugger does not receive any funding, and we respect our readers, so we will never run intrusive ads or sponsored posts. Instead, we are reader-supported. Help us keep Slugger independent by becoming a friend of Slugger. While we run a tight ship and no one gets paid to write, we need money to help us cover our costs.

If you like what we do, we are asking you to consider giving a monthly donation of any amount, or you can give a one-off donation. Any amount is appreciated.