There are some people you just expect to be around forever. Your parents, teachers from school frozen at their exact age when you were most impressionable/intimidated, the queen, David Attenborough, Neil Diamond (bear with...). These are not people (and naturally there are your own countless others) that you ever imagine having to deal with the death of (Remember the shock of Diana or even the Queen Mother, who was a hundred and eleventy-ten and pickled in Dubonnet and gin).
On my own list was Terry Wogan. His sudden death has shocked and flattened me as if it were actually my own father who'd upped and died without telling me. Obviously my emotions are running slightly closer to the surface than perhaps is normal, but a week later, I'm really still quite emotional about it all.
I was first introduced to Terry and Radio 2 through Gemma, friend of yore and yonks and I was smitten, even as a teenager. I'm not going to bang on about sly subtle humour and erudite radio wizardry because at that age, I had no clue. I just liked the music. And the fact that he seemed to have such fun on air, as did the team around him. And that he - and everyone else - had no problem with corpsing on air, which is genuinely perhaps one of the funniest things that can happen (see here for a Bradley Walsh clip than has me hurting every time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmwGFX5pgXw ). Wogan seemed to do it every show. I listened to him through my teenage years, through driving to Ottakar's of a morning to work, through university and beyond. I stood in my kitchen in Beulah Hill in London when he signed off from the breakfast show in 2009, weeping and late for work. I cried with laughter through his Eurovision years; the infamous year of Denmark I made myself a complete Middle Eastern picnic and watched it on my own in our "custard" flat in Barnsbury and almost made myself sick trying to retell it, slightly drunk, to a slightly drunk Matt after he came home.
More: He looks a bit like my dad. Enough for a bit of healthy transference, probably. And he played Neil Diamond a lot, like Pa. He never had a bad word to say about anyone and his general demeanour seemed to suggest that life is something to be laughed at, gently, without hurting anyone, something we should all aspire to, I suspect.
I also feel so damn cross. For him to have kept his illness so private (so much so in fact that when Paul Donovan, Sunday Time radio reviewer, wrote to the BBC about his extended absence, they had no answer to give him) is both typical and infuriating. His death has come so out of the blue, we have had no time to assimilate it; he has left us bereft without explanation or apology, which is both uncharacteristic and totally him. For him, many have written, his family was his all, his everything, his only and they alone knew and coped with his illness. He had no wish to inflict upon others. But the thing is, we were his family too. And although it was entirely his, and right, decision, to die in private with his closest for company, we TOGS will mourn him as family too. Because he gave us a piece of him and in doing so, belonged to all of us.
RIP Wogan. We miss you already.
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