BBC Radio 4 2016-02-02

Good Morning

The vast outpouring of grief and the sense of loss which filled the airwaves yesterday, as listeners sent in their personal memories of Sir Terry Wogan (most particularly on Radio 2, but also across the whole of the BBC) revealed something important about how deep-rooted broadcasting is in our national life, as well as the extraordinary affection in which this giant of a broadcaster was held.

Helen Boaden, the Director of BBC Radio, suggested that Sir Terry's secret was to sound as if he was only ever talking to one person. Terry encapsulated that when he stood down from his breakfast show. “Thank you for being my friend,” he said, addressing his audience as if it were a single individual.

But it worked beautifully. And listeners reciprocated in the same mode. “He was the only passenger who has been in every car I’ve owned over the past 30 years,” one listener texted in.

This is surely how Terry became a national treasure. He may, at the time, have had the biggest audience on British radio but he was only ever talking to you – and intimately - walking the dog, buttering the toast, or just waiting to get up. One man, one voice, accompanying you, through the daily routine and the highs and lows of life, a fount of exuberance in the good times or a source of perspective in the bad.

It was that – even more than all the great work Sir Terry did for Children in Need, or the celebrities he gently mocked in chat shows, or his pricking of the pomposity of Eurovision – it was that intimacy in the every day, that brought him so close to people.

Terry’s voice was warm, genial, dry, funny but always life-affirming. And the importance of his voice cannot be understated. We know that the uniqueness of each and every voice is part of what makes us the people that we are. In the various books of the bible, God does not appear in great swirling visions; he makes himself heard through his voice: speaking to people’s hearts.

When loved ones are taken away, it is the absence of their voice which is often one of the most difficult things to come to terms with, as the silence strangely deepens. In November, my own mum died quite suddenly; she was exactly the same age as Sir Terry. Her voice, each and every day, is something I deeply miss. It will, of course, be the same for Sir Terry’s family.

And, in a different way, the loss of this much loved voice is already an experience shared by his wider family of listeners, woven into the fabric of the life of millions of people right across the nation.

May he Rest in Peace.