Terry Wogan: Breakfast cereals now taste a little less sweet

A rookie broadcaster and budding music journalist in the pre-internet London of the mid-eighties, I knew a media master when I heard one

Terry Wogan on Air In 1976 At BBC Manchester (Rex)

Everyone of a certain age has a Sir Terry Wogan anecdote. They may have different punchlines, but they share a common theme. None of them show him in a bad light.

The difference between the Wogan you heard or watched and the private one; the person you met at a function, after the microphones or the cameras had been switched off, remained wafer thin (or rather canapé-like... Wogan and his production team were fond of a well-stocked buffet). What you see was what you got.

Listening to him in 1976, when he had already made the switch from Radio 1 to Radio 2 and was popping up on television hosting Come Dancing, I was fascinated by his Irish brogue and easy-going persona. A rookie broadcaster and budding music journalist in the pre-internet London of the mid-eighties, I knew a media master when I heard one.

Over the years, Wogan broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee, from British Columbia and from an oil platform in the North Sea, and also made sorties across continental Europe, venturing into Russia as part of the BBC’s coverage of the Eurovision Song Contest. He further bolstered the coffers of the BBC’s Children In Need charity appeal with a series of rather risqué CDs Radio 2 Janet & John Stories released to benefit the fund.

Apart from the bons mots, the bonbons, the buffets and the bonhomie, the one thing I will remember most fondly about Sir Terry Wogan was his introduction to the pastoral compositions of Clifford T Ward, a sublime singer-songwriter I have come to consider as important as Kevin Ayers, Nick Drake or John Martyn.

Whenever Wogan span Ward’s wistful “Gaye”, the breakfast cereals tasted sweeter, the British Isles made more sense.

These are still Isles of Wogan Wonder.