Wogan

When I was a child, I recall that every morning we sat in the kitchen eating breakfast cereal. My mum had BBC Radio 2 on in the background, and Terry Wogan was the host. In the late 1970s, Radio 2 was a very different-sounding station than it is today. This was the time of Wogan’s first period on the breakfast show, which ran from 1972-1984, and his Floral Dance era.

In 1985, Michael Grade overhauled BBC1 television’s early evening schedule. EastEnders was introduced on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on the other three days a week, Terry’s chat show, Wogan, aired. It became a staple of our early evening television viewing. I guess, at 15 or so, I would have been waiting for the pop act that often appeared on the show. I do recall not knowing who many of the guests were.

These Wogan-branded mugs have been sitting in my cupboard for years. I must have acquired them on a childhood trip to London in the mid-1980s. I recall that there used to be a BBC Shop near Broadcasting House on Regent Street, and I may have bought them there, as it would have been on my wish list to visit. I imagine it would have been the heyday of the chat show and that there would have also been lots of EastEnders merchandise around too. This is what I opted for.

I doubt they are a collector’s item—or anything like that—but I don’t really want to use them because they are not replaceable. But in the spirit of cataloguing my House Inventory, I thought they would be today’s picture.

In later life, Terry Wogan suggested that the ending of the chat show, on 3 July 1992, was handled badly by the BBC. They replaced his chat show with a soap opera about Brits living in Spain, Eldorado, which was a bit of a failure and only ran for a year. Terry himself returned to the Radio 2 breakfast show and, for many years, had the most-listened-to show on UK radio.