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  Dear Terry,

  I represent two families of country yokels from the depths of Derbyshire. One Sunday early in April, complete with dirty wellies and straws from corners of mouth, we came to the big city to show our children the sights. Buckingham Palace, Houses of Parliament, the War Museum and the Tower. But what did our wives insist most on seeing? The BBC, and in particular Terry’s Window so that they could in future imagine more realistically the goings-on so beautifully described.

  So we stood at the top of Regent Street and gazed in wonder at those magnificent bulwarks of the BBC. So this was where the great master talked to us from. By astute use of our divining rod, sense of smell and allowing for the wind, we even worked out the window you view from. So there were the edifices of Regent Street and the hole in the road where David Hamilton landed on his head. So there was the DG’s garden (aren’t his shallots early this year?).

  But other questions remained unanswered. Can you help?

  1 Was the person with the mop and cigarette in reception the DG herself?

  2 Was the other lady in reception, wearing a dressing gown being frantically chased by a man in pinstripes, rehearsing for the Moscow Olympics?

  3 Are the BBC bike sheds those premises under Oxford Circus with the sign of a red circle and horizontal line?

  John Caws,

  Boylestone, Derbyshire.

  In answer to those thought-provoking queries:

  1 No. The Chairman.

  2 No. It was a member of the BBC Board of Governors, jogging with Lord Longford.

  3 No. That is the DG’s private bunker, in the likely event of a coup d’état.

  Great British Food

  When all a body has time for, of an early morn, is a gulp of coffee and a swig of almost-natural orange juice, you can scarcely blame him indulging in food fantasies as the pangs of hunger gnaw at his very vitals.

  So, at breakfast time, my listeners help themselves from sideboards groaning under the weight of silver dishes full of kedgeree, kidneys, bacon (albeit not as crispy as it was before the war), eggs done every conceivable way, chipolatas, the odd chop, and bowls of steaming porridge.

  As the old brain becomes increasingly addled, I forget how the great ‘Porridge on the Gallop’ controversy started. Enough to say that someone was sufficiently foolish to state that in the Great Houses of England, Milord of the Manor always took his porridge at a brisk trot around the baronial hall, and only a scurvy knave or, indeed, a varlet, would dream of sitting down to eat the stuff.

  Dear Mr Wogan,

  Now the ‘Porridge on the Gallop’ controversy has once again raised its ugly head, I feel I must settle the matter once and for all. The tradition has its roots in early Scottish history when the laird would take two of his gillies and head for the haggis hills. This being in the days before battery haggis breeding methods. The porridge was actually bait for the haggis, but the journey often being very long the laird would tear off a piece of porridge, cover it with salt in an attempt to kill the taste and chew it as they went along. When they got to the hills the gillies would lay the bait, and when the haggis came down to nibble the porridge the laird would creep up behind the unsuspecting haggis and hit it between the gillies, usually using a No 7 spurtle. The haggis would remain on its back thrashing its legs in the air until it was gathered up and taken back to the castle to be fattened up, only to be slaughtered on Burns night.

  If your laughter is truly due to your jeans, I suggest you buy a larger pair or broadcast standing up.

  Lord Ferendune

  Lechlade, Gloucestershire.

  This kind of stuff naturally led to many a boring old Scots tale of how the honest gillie would boil 100 cwt of porridge every Sunday, and leave it to cool in a bedroom drawer. Then, every morning, before departing up the side of Ben Nevis after the sheep, he would hack out a lump of cold porridge to sustain him through the blizzards.

  Then people started sending me strange, heathen artefacts carved from wood, called ‘postles’.

  The Postle

  Porridge is stirred with a postle,

  You funny old Irish loon,

  Sure, even out in the backwoods,

  They’ve heard of a postle spoon.

  ’Tis made from the horns of a haggis,

  Carved and polished to taste,

  And worn to the left of the sporran,

  That’s just below the waist.

  It’s also used in the Highlands,

  To remove the dumplings from stew,

  And at night is tucked in a bedsock,

  Along with the old Skean Dhu.

  Sometimes down in the Lowlands,

  They wear them strapped to their legs,

  And use them each Passion Sunday,

  To shell their new-laid scotch eggs.

  I know this is all authentic,

  I was told by a couple of swells,

  Namely Brenda of Brixton,

  And ‘Disgusted’, Tunbridge Wells!

  Vic Jarvis,

  Forest Hill.

  And, of course, it was only a matter of time until I received a stave or two in praise of another great British delicacy: tripe.

  Tripe

  You can braise it in sauterne

  In a great big Grecian Urn,

  You can hang it till it’s blue

  And slap it in a stew,

  You can fluff it, you can stuff it,

  You can fry in fat and puff it

  Oh tripe is the stuff for me.

  You can mash it, you can hash it,

  You can whip it up and smash it,

  You can drop it on the floor,

  It’ll still come back for more.

  Yes, tripe is the stuff for me.

  For it takes a lot of beating,

  Forgive me for repeating,

  Yes, tripe is the stuff for me.

  Brenda Ray,

  Nottingham.

  Considering how I had pushed the kindly folk of Cornwall beyond human endurance with my rendition of their ‘Floral Dance’, it now seems an extraordinarily plucky, nay foolhardy, move to have broadcast ‘live’ from Penzance. But I did, and anyway most of the smaller bruises have now virtually disappeared. It was a wonderful morning – the seagulls cried, the people were jolly, I ate fresh crab claws, and a baker presented me with a four-foot-long, two-foot-wide, genuine Cornish Pasty. We carried the wonderful-smelling, steaming giant to the Radio Car, in order to attack it with a blunt instrument after the programme. Then ‘live’, on the air, the great Pasty slid off a table, and covered the interior of the van to a depth of four feet in meat, potatoes and gravy. Two years later, they’re still finding bits of it in the equipment . . .

  Cornish Calamity

  ‘Wogan’s coming,’ the Cornish cried,

  ‘All our maidens we must hide.’

  ‘The ladies adore him,’ the fishermen said,

  ‘What about sending him a mackerel head?’

  ‘Don’t ’ee be so cruel,’ came the baker’s voice,

  ‘We’ll treat the man to something choice.

  A pasty we’ll make, an ’andsome one,

  Get out the chuck steak, ’tatoes, onion,

  His initials we’ll place on the crisp brown crust,

  To show in Radio 2 we trust.’

  But Oh! as in the car he sped

  The pasty broke, Terry turned his head

  ‘A beautiful one, ’twas grand,’ he wept

  As deftly away from the gravy he leapt.

  So beware all you who bake pasties grand,

  Then give them to folks from Ireland,

  Pack them secure in a leak-proof box

  To prevent hot gravy dripping into their socks!

  Mrs Thelma Morgan,

  Farnham,

  Surrey (but a Cornish exile).

  ‘Set a spell, and let your saddle cool’

  Not many people know that I was probably the only boy in my native township of Limerick to have a personally autographed photo of Gene Au
try aboard Champion, the Wonder Horse. I never went much on Roy Rogers and Trigger, maybe it was the way his eyeballs disappeared into his forehead whenever he smiled. Gene seemed the straighter shooter somehow.

  So it seems that I’ve always been steeped in prairie lore, and songs of the sagebrush. I’ve seen enough of the cowboy epics to survive the Mojave Desert with just the odd prickly pear cactus, and I daresay that I could recognize an Apache war-arrow if I saw it sticking out of Ward Bond’s back. Incidentally, that reminds me of one of the most sophisticated yet barbaric means of easing the BBC’s Block in Promotion – the ‘Run of the Arrow’. The DG would loose a shaft from his longbow in the direction of Oxford Circus, and from wherever the arrow landed, an unfortunate senior executive would be given a head start. If he made it down Regent Street to Piccadilly Circus before the whooping horde of junior bucks caught up with him, he kept his job, and his scalp. If not . . . Songs like ‘Git Along Little Dogies’ and ‘Empty Saddles in the Old Corral’ are meat and drink to me, so it’s natural that my radio programme should have the tang of the camp-fire and the sniff of the bunkhouse about it. At least that’s what we put it down to.

  A cat called Wogan

  Standing at stud, in some lush pasture, is a bull called Wogan. A prize-winning St Bernard and a Wolfhound bear the same proud name. Recently, a listener named a couple of kids after me – I was a bit nonplussed when they turned out to be goats.

  Dear Terry,

  Heard you say the other morning that you’d had a couple of goats named after you. My son Kenton is an avid listener to your programme whilst milking the cows. Consequently we now have a cow named Terry Wogan. Incidentally you are a very good milker.

  Stan Honeybun,

  Glastonbury, Somerset.

  An unfortunate thoroughbred racehorse (of which fine animal, more later) was lumbered with a similar burden. And then the cat-lovers got me.

  Dear Terrible Wogan,

  I heard you read out a letter this morning from a listener concerning his cat’s name, and how he wouldn’t let his mother call it Wogan . . . Well we HAVE called ours Wogan, and I know you will be riveted to your BBC stool to hear why we chose such a strange name. Like all good fairy stories it starts: Once upon a time . . . My husband, who incidentally is called Terry, said that he was adamant he was not going to have a cat, so when we decided to get one we thought we should call it Wogan. This is because he hates cats with the same intensity that he hates you, and thought that every time he kicked it across the room he could shout ‘Wogan’ and would feel a lot better.

  As it turned out it was a very good choice as he (the cat, not my husband, though come to think of it) has your same rotund middle, bright yellow eyes and bushy tail, though his is striped. He also talks non-stop first thing in the morning when he wants food. If you bring home rats, mice and rabbits for breakfast, then it surely is a family trait, but what about lying on your back rolling over waiting to have a fuss made of you . . . it wouldn’t surprise me. I know you will think this all a load of Old Wogan, but you only have to ring up the cat’s vet, or the kennels where he spent his two weeks’ summer holiday.

  We call him Wogie or Woges for short . . . my husband calls him Rat.

  Vivien L Hart,

  Ashford, Kent.

  The Floral Dance

  It was at an impressionable age that I first heard my father, Lord Wogan of the Reeks, intone the ‘Cornish Floral Dance’. He would make the welkin ring with it for a radius of 10 miles as he performed his ablutions of a morning. My father had other crowd-pleasers in his repertoire, such as ‘Dead for Bread’, but the Floral Dance remained etched in my memory, and probably stunted my growth.

  So, when the opportunity came to have my revenge on the thing, I grasped it. I’m only sorry that so many music-lovers had to suffer in the process.

  Almost as soon as I began playing the instrumental version of the aforementioned Cornish Disease, by the Faggots and Gastric Brass and Reed Ensemble, or, as they prefer to be known, the Brighouse and Rastrick Band, I was reminded of my boyhood suffering, and it was an automatic reflex to mumble along with it.

  The instrumental version subsequently became a ginormous hit, selling well over a million copies, but I received even more disgruntled letters than usual, from people who had heard the record on my programme, rushed out in a panic, bought it, and then found that I wasn’t singing on it!

  Being as quick as your other men to know a hot property when they heard it, the record companies paid absolutely no attention.

  Then a trusting, if ageing, singer/producer called Mike Redway had the idea of doing a vocal version with our hero. Well, my bird (as they say in Cornwall), you know all too well the rest of the unsavoury tale:

  How a hitherto discerning public actually bought the thing, and made it into a hit, rising to No 15 in the Top Twenty.

  How this unexpected disaster provoked not one, but two appearances on ‘Top of the Pops’ by a paunchy, raddled old disc-jockey.

  How, in an effort to placate the angry weenies, punks, teds and teenies, this pathetic figure hurled flowers at them.

  How they hurled them back, shouting ‘Get off, you silly old fool,’ and other youthful jibes, with which I will not trouble you.

  It’s not surprising really that the more sensitive poetically-minded souls took it so badly:

  Dear Terry,

  On the advice of a friend, I recently bought your recording of ‘The Floral Dance’, and on playing the record,

  I thought I heard the curious tone,

  Of Wogan on the gramophone,

  Grunting here, and groaning there,

  Devoid of timing, tone and flair,

  Trying to make the most of his chance,

  With his hideous attempt at ‘The Floral Dance’.

  John Betteley,

  Birmingham.

  Floral Tribute

  I thought I could hear the curious moan

  Of Terence Wogan and a big trombone,

  Even though he wasn’t dumb

  He got drunk on a tot of rum.

  When drunk in a trance

  He began to sing the Floral Dance.

  As I was made deaf on a winter’s night

  Stars were dark in the darkened light,

  Then he rode off upon his mare

  Into the foul and dampened air,

  Of that quaint old studio.

  Borne from a far Thames River breeze

  Joining the smell of Terry’s knees

  Distant moans of an old man’s voice

  Played by a DJ recorder by chance

  And a bomb came floating down.

  That put an end to the curious moan

  Of Terence Wogan and a big trombone

  Even though he wasn’t dumb

  He got drunk on a tot of rum.

  When he was drunk in a trance

  He began to sing the Floral Dance,

  He began to sing the Floral Dance.

  Anon.

  Terry and his Floral Dance

  I hurried down at a quarter to eight, turned on the radio to keep a date,

  Started the breakfast, had to frown, there was not a single sound,

  In our quaint, old-fashioned town.

  I hit it on the back, ‘punched it up the throat’, could not get a

  Solitary note,

  Spilled the milk, burned the toast, made them all late ’cause I was slow,

  But I had to get that set to go, FOR

  I listen to the man with the curious tone with a voice as mellow as a big trombone,

  Gave the set a poke with my thumb but not so much as a rum-tum-tum,

  Today there would be no chance of my daily session with the Floral Dance.

  I felt so lonely standing there but I could only stand and stare,

  Has Terry got up the DG’s ‘snout’? Has the DG driven him out

  Of quaint old London town?

  Then I thought tomorrow he’s bound to be back – if the DG has not given
<
br />   Him the sack –

  With outstretched hands he’ll rush along, down Regent Street amid the throng

  And burst into his jolly song. And he’ll

  Sing like a man with the curious tone with a voice as mellow as a big

  trombone

  No need to poke the set with my thumb for he will be there with a rum-tum-tum

  Then we all can sing and prance to the merry music of the Floral Dance.

  Dancing here, jigging there, Weetybangs flying everywhere,

  I will be in my normal, happy trance,

  HURRAY FOR TERRY AND HIS FLORAL DANCE.

  Barbara Thompson.

  Dear Mr Wogan

  Is that your real name or like the other recording superstars is it just to obscure the fact that you were born Stanley Trench? Anyway, I’ve always liked your chocolates and towelling and as a mark of my appreciation I am sending you a lyric for your follow-up waxing. You’ll see that it fits the Floral Dance, which seems to be the only tune you know.

  Keith Hamnett,

  Altrincham, Cheshire.

  The Floral Dance

  Chorus

  Ho, ho, the Terry Wogan Show

  Half past seven and it’s off we go

  Tips and quips, music so to speak

  All together all five days are weak.

  Low Bit No 1

  Every morning on the radio

  Why not listen to the Terry Wogan Show

  Something for everybody every day

  Specially when he goes on holiday

  Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho

  Low Bit No 2

  If you like listening to a certain song

  Don’t tell Terry Wogan or he’ll sing along

  There are times when he tries to sing the Floral Dance

  Other times the music stands a chance

  Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho.

  Knickers of World War 2

  Mercifully, time has drawn a veil over how the whole sorry business of ‘knickers’ got started on the Breakfast Show. Certainly, it must have upset many a more delicately nurtured soul over his coddled egg.