There are plenty of laugh-out-loud yarns in Terry Wogan's 267-page autobiography but nothing is more splutteringly hilarious than the irony on page 255.
He is writing about his great friend David Hatch - "the finest senior BBC executive I ever worked for" - who managed the awesome feat of retiring from the BBC without cursing the organisation from a height. "Whatever his beef with the Birtians, and I am sure he hated the direction his beloved BBC was being driven, he said nary a word. He was right. Who cares, except yourself? Ranting and fulminating about what was, or might have been, is pathetic. The pointing of fingers, the settling of old scores in articles or biographies is saddening. If you are going, go - and take your baggage with you . . ."
Sterling advice of course. But coming smartly on the heels of 254 pages of more untended baggage than you'll find at rush-hour in Heathrow - most of it directed at the BBC - well, you have to laugh.
But in this creme caramel of a book - a feathery blend of Ballykissangel, with a drizzle of Little House on the Prairie - it's the crunchy bits, Sopranos-style, that bring you back.
"Even the BBC cannot ignore talent that bites your legs . . ."; "The attitude seems to be: be grateful that you are working for the BBC, and get on with it"; "The great BBC maxim is: `If it ain't broke - break it . . .' "; "The BBC never liked to encourage the hobbledehoys too much, feeling that it would give the simple-minded presenter ideas above his station" . . . But the self-styled Old Geezer reserves his serious ire for focus-groups (so beloved, too, of New Labour) and the relentless, pathetic striving for a younger audience. John Birt, in Wogan's view, was a slave to reason, an engineer by training who "never grasped the essential imponderability of our game. He thought the inexactitude, the utter unpredictability of public taste, could be ironed out by reason, procedures, good management - and focus groups, the constant referral to the public. What do they think? What do they want? Are we serving them?" Laudable, but a waste of time. Gather a bunch of people at a venue and ask them to criticise, he says, and that's just what they will do. They won't just sit and let it wash over them, as if they were watching at home. They will nag and niggle, pick little holes, because that's that they're being paid to do. So all you get is a hodge-podge of subjective opinions "that can never, logically, be brought into an objective whole".
And you certainly won't ever get a new idea from a focus group. "All they can tell you is whether they liked what they have seen. Which, famously, has led to the endless re-working of the same ideas: gardening, cooking, makeovers, documentaries, from driving schools to cruise ships. If a personality is popular with the focus groups, they are immediately signed up for enormous amounts of money, and stuck on every conceivable programme until the BBC gets its money's worth", which at last explains Anthea Turner.
For Wogan, the whole process is beyond contempt. "It is an abrogation of responsibility, and for a television company it is a declaration of loss of confidence, and a loss of faith in the creative abilities of its production staff. The decline in BBC1 Television is directly attributable to fear, and the focus group." Now replace the term "focus group" with "ratings" and think: where have we heard that before?
Children In Need (the charity telethon he co-presents) supplies the pretext for a general battering of those sad television Tristrams who ache to belong in the cool crowd.
"In 1999, it was decreed that Children in Need should try to win over a younger audience. Apparently, it was not reaching the `young male' . . . Why it should wish to reach disinterested young males when it was more than satisfying its target audience of the very young and their parents and grandparents, remains a mystery. Such views have, however, changed the programme over the years. It is much quicker, slicker, pop-orientated, but not better . . ." Never mind, he writes, that Children in Need gets as good, if not better, viewing figures than "trendy, pacy, in-your-face" Red Nose Day; "certain executives would rather bask in the reflected glory of Richard Curtis - and then, there is lunch at the Groucho, with Lenny, Angus, Paul or Chris. C'mon, Children in Need is just not sexy, is it?" Boom Boom.
By contrast, RTE gets off lightly, and is mainly a source of fabulously funny yarns. He does remember, however, that Radio Eireann newsreaders auditioned - and rejected - for the new Irish television service included himself, Andy O'Mahony and Gay Byrne. He recalls that he broke new ground with a risky radio show called Terry Awhile ("Some title, but I was young") which involved "live, unedited, unexpurgated phone calls". And he's clearly still smarting that the papers knew before he did that Jackpot was being axed (a humiliation not exclusive to him or his time). But he nonetheless notes later on that "it wasn't until I began my career in Britain that I worked with people who manifestly could not have cared less about me", and acknowledges that some good has sprung from his old tormentor: "Radio Eireann has become the forum of Irish public opinion, and is helping to free the country from the small-minded parochialism, the clinging to the past, the prejudice that for so long bedevilled it . . ."
And apart from all that? Well, he's a disturbingly contented fellow now, is Terry: "Conventional, bourgeois, middle-class, that's me". There was, fado fado, the boorish, drunken bully of a grandfather, the modest father who had to step off the pavement in deference to Lord Powerscourt's superior presence, the father-in-law who majored in "utter self-absorption", and those two and a half years in Belvedere College during which Terry was invited to just one other boy's home. There was the loss of their first baby - from a heart condition - which Terry and his wife, Helen, are still unable to speak about; the slow, cruel death of his mother with rheumatoid arthritis; and the media harassment after various "minor peccadilloes" of his teenage son (which get no airing here other than a reference to general embarrassment and Mark's determination to make it up to them by his achievements).
Apart from all that, though, his life has been a veritable Cosby Show of fun, love and happiness. Now 62 and very comfortable, he is still ecstatically happily married to Helen, an unashamed virgin on their wedding night in 1965 (as was he), a former Balmain model, the most beautiful, the most gentle, the most understanding woman in Ireland. "Helen loved it because we did," is how he describes her demeanour on one family trip, in a phrase that seems to sum her up generally.
They have three children who were never asked what they wanted to do with their lives and who phone each other every single damn day, not to mention a procession of clever, warm, protective, mostly rich friends.
As well as all these blessings, Wogan is a first-class story-teller, one of those rare beings whose drole, self-deprecating voice transfers with ease and authenticity to print. How could anyone take against a man who voluntarily drags up old, toe-curling quotes such as: "I would not regard myself as a disc jockey. I would prefer to be known as a compere or a communicator . . ." Or who quotes such testosterone-charged entries from his diary, aged 14, as: "We went to town in the afternoon with Mammy," or: "Lent beginning! Hope I can keep my resolutions."
And yet, the most persistent impression of this intelligent, funny, patently decent and private man is of someone who feels he has never been taken as seriously as he deserved - in spite of the OBE, countless industry awards and accolades, the highest current radio-listenership in Europe, the hob-nobbing with a string of Directors General, the fact that someone once thought to send him a letter bomb . . . and despite his conviction that a radio presenter is often no more than "a voice shouting in the wilderness, a duck farting in thunder".
It is in the nature of biography to resurrect old sores with old memories - and, to be fair to the book, the gripes are well scattered and outnumbered by the good times - but the man clearly feels under-appreciated and certainly feels no loyalty to the BBC. Thus, the constant references to BBC Radio 2's success being the Corporation's Best Kept Secret (for fear of damaging "the sensitive young souls of Radio 1") and the harking back to the axing of his chat show in favour of the execrable Eldorado (and, in a re-run of the RTE Jackpot incident, finding out about it in the papers). But his sense of being under-valued may not be confined to the BBC. There are those revealing quotation marks when he refers to Robert Kee's return to "serious" journalism from breakfast TV; even the cut at Madame Tussaud's wax museum ("never seen a dummy that looks remotely like the person it is supposed to represent"), which, it turns out, has dumped his likeness in a back room.
The BBC still hasn't copped on, though. The head of the digital channel BBC Choice, Stuart Murphy, stung by Wogan's criticisms, dismissed him as "arrogant" and "out of touch". Wogan's response - at 62 and still pulling in 7 million listeners for the BBC - could reasonably be: "Out of touch with what, exactly?"
On the other hand, anyone who can write that "you will never find a gang of Irishmen picking on another group because of their colour or race", or that "the Irish just do not care about cars" would appear to have a bit of catching up to do on his native land.
Is It Me? Terry Wogan, an autobiography is published by BBC Worldwide, price £16.99 in the UK
