Farewell to el Tel

As Sir Terry Wogan prepares to host his last Radio 2 Breakfast Show, lifelong TOG Ben Bentley recalls speaking to the great man.

I have a confession to make. I've woken up to Wogan for years. Way before Terry was cool again, way before you could admit to laughing at his jokes without people thinking you were a weirdo who wears pro-celebrity golf wear around the house.

A TOG before my time, no less. The only things I didn't have were the car sticker and the turtle-neck jumper.

And so tomorrow morning will be, erm, Terry-ble. After five decades in broadcasting, the 71-year-old legend of the airwaves delivers his very last weekday breakfast show on Radio 2.

As traditional as the Great British fry-up, Terry brings the morning to our breakfast tables, setting up some 8 million listeners up for the day, as they come round, wash, dress the kids, and head off to work in the early morning.

Listeners across the country are prone to doing weird and wonderful things while listening to his show.

Listener Kim March, who lives in Church Stretton, says: "I regularly listen to Terry's show on Radio 2 when I'm working out on the cross trainer this can be quite a dangerous combination as uncontrolled laughter occasionally results in my falling off!"

Terry-related accidents, however, are the the most pleasant sorts of misdemeanours. How many of us have choked on a cornflake or had a sugar puff sent down "the wrong way" as a result of one of Sir Terry's spats with fellow Terry's Old Geezer Deadly over the latest goings on from EastEnders?

Kim welcomes these happy accidents, adding: "I hope the Beeb produces a 'Terry's Finest Moments' CD I shall fall off to that instead!"

Sir Terry, or S'Terry as we know him, is an institution who works outside the laws of institutions. He has unwittingly become the most cutting-edge broadcaster in the land, with no recourse to unsavoury language or abusive behaviour (unlesss it's aimed at the Greek entry in the Eurovision Song Contest).

Perhaps one of the reasons Terry is so popular is his jocularity. And laughter at his own jokes only makes them doubly funny, because suddenly you are listening to Terry listening to his own gags. Not since Dudley Moore and Peter Cook has laughter at laughter been so infectious.

I once interviewed the veteran broadcaster, ahead of his appearance at the Shropshire Star-sponsored Proms in the Park concert at Weston Park in 2006. He phoned me up personally, straight after his breakfast show, and we chatted for a good 20 minutes. He was just like he was on-air, relishing every lyrical syllable of the English language as it fell from his mouth and landed the right way up in my notepad. I envisaged the man as I always do, sporting a jumper and trousers, and summoned up the courage to ask an awkward question: So, Terry, what are you wearing?

"A jumper and trousers," he replied. "Might I ask the same question of you? No, hang on, let me guess. . ."

Apart from his rapturous trip to Shropshire, Terry has crossed paths with the county on numerous occasions. In 2002 he had an on-air giggle over the place name Pant near Oswestry, questioning its very existence.

The show's travel correspondent, Fran Godfrey, had mentioned that road closures in Shropshire and Powys were causing major problems for motorists. She said this was particularly bad around the village of Pant.

Terry then said: "Tell me, Fran. Is there really a place called Pant?"

It led to councillor Dilys Gaskill later putting the record straight, saying: "Pant is actually a Welsh name and means 'hollow under the hill'."

Sometimes Terry's county connections have been incidental, but clearly the man knows a good tale when he hears one. And one could only have come from Shropshire.

It involved Frankwell Little Boro WI, who in May this year heard a fragrant presentation on the many uses of lavender.

Members listened as the gentle "Lavender Lady" of Guilsfield, near Welshpool, Sandra Ball, told how one of her tiny tooth fairy cushions had ended up being detonated by customs officials Down Under.

Apparently, our Antipodean cousins do not allow organic material into their country and Australia classes lavender as organic. The tooth fairy cushion, with its attractive pocket for photographs, was blown to smithereens.

The story, with just the right amount of parochial madness to it, was picked up by Terry whose irreverent wit brought it to the ears of millions.

Terry began working for BBC Radio presenting Midday Spin in the mid-1960s and, on the inauguration of BBC Radio 1, he presented the Tuesday edition of Late Night Extra for two years. After covering Jimmy Young's mid-morning show throughout July 1969, he was offered a regular afternoon slot, officially on BBC Radio 1, but a lack of funding meant that it was also broadcast on BBC Radio 2.

In April 1972, he took over the breakfast show on BBC Radio 2 and enjoyed unprecedented popularity, achieving audiences of up to 7.6 million.

His seemingly ubiquitous presence across the media meant that he frequently became the butt of jokes by comedians of the time, among them The Goodies and The Barron Knights.

If longevity is anything to go by, however, the joke was on them. And anyway, with self-deprecation being his stock in trade, Terry Wogan has always been the best person to take the mickey out of Terry Wogan.

His style is inimitable. There will be no new Terry Wogan and pretenders to his disc jockey throne would be advised to not try and emulate the great man.

Pete Wagstaffe, managing director of MNA county radio stations including Telford FM and Severn FM, says: "Changing a breakfast guy on a radio station is really a massive gamble. By switching them on you invite this person into home first thing in the morning you have to feel comfortable with that person, like the music they play and, of course, be informed."

Tomorrow is Sir Terry's last day at the helm of Radio 2's weekday breakfast show. It is bound to be an emotional goodbye, for once with tears of sadness as well as laughter.

Come next week, we may well still be tucking into sausage, bacon and eggs, but breakfast will never be the same again.