The phrases are much more poignant now than they have been 12 years in the past, when a colleague of BBC radio’s Steve Wright sounded a quiet warning.
‘The one thing that dominates Wrightie’s life is his radio present,’ he stated.
‘It really is the only thing that gets him up in the morning. But we all worry about him because it can’t go on for ever.’
In September 2022, to his disbelief and misery, the person who lived for his every day Steve Wright In The Afternoon present on BBC Radio 2 found he was to be ousted.
Though bosses allowed him the compensation of a Sunday morning slot on the station and a podcast, the mainstay of his profession was kicked away after many years.
Steve Wright, who died yesterday aged 69, pictured in 1994. He broadcast his closing Steve Wright In the Afternoon present on 30 September 2022
By 1988, Wright was attracting 7.2 million listeners a day. Not everybody liked him: The Smiths wrote Panic as a protest in opposition to his tendency to observe grim information bulletins with pop hits
The unhappy information yesterday that Wright has died, aged 69, has in some methods a bitter inevitability. His alternative on Radio 2, Scott Mills, could have roughly the identical listening figures, round six-and-a-quarter million. But crucially, he appeals to a youthful viewers, extra within the 35 to 54 age bracket, than within the 55s and over. It’s onerous to flee the conclusion that Steve Wright was sacrificed for a demographic tweak, after devoting his life to the BBC.
And to say he ‘devoted his life’ isn’t any overstatement. Wright was such a radio obsessive that his concept of a vacation was to spend an extended weekend in a New York lodge room, tuning in to American stations and making notes on the whole lot he heard.
A pal bumped in to him as soon as at Paddington station, boarding the Heathrow shuttle. ‘He was literally going to sit in a U.S. hotel room for a few days to listen to local stations.
‘I asked where his luggage was and he just waved his passport at me. “I buy essentials like a toothbrush, underwear and socks while I’m there,” he stated, “and throw them away at the end.”’ The pal added: ‘He is obsessed by the medium, which is why he has stayed at the top for so long.’
Wright’s devotion to American radio had a formative impact on Radio 1 within the Thatcher period. He arrived in 1979, after chopping his tooth recording jingles for Reading’s Thames Valley Radio: his love of wacky humour caught the temper of the second, at a time when Kenny Everett’s zany radio antics have been the template for all new DJs.
Unable to withstand a pun, the Beeb paired him with fellow trainee Mike Read for the Read And Wright Show.
After a quick stint on Radio Atlantis in Belgium and Radio Luxembourg, Wright landed a Saturday evening slot on Radio 1.
The vitality he introduced was explosive — 45 years later, I can nonetheless keep in mind his pleasure when he performed The Buggles’ electropop single Video Killed The Radio Star.
It was apparent he wouldn’t keep on the sidelines for lengthy. Radio 1 had nobody else like him.
Wright at all times seemed like he had a lot to say, so many gags to crack and favorite discs to share, he would possibly burst with eagerness.
Bosses let him have a crack at presenting the Sunday night chart present on Radio 1. But he didn’t actually hit his stride till 1981, when he was given the afternoon present on the station as a try-out. His creativeness bubbled over, with a number of characters and catchphrases.
Mr Angry from Purley was one common — a choleric, nasal voice whose arrival was heralded by the trill of a Trimphone.
‘Ahh, Mr Angry,’ Steve would greet him warmly, earlier than the ranting started: ‘I’m seething!
‘And I’ve bought just a few issues I need to kind out with you, my lad!’ persevering with to the purpose of incoherent hysteria — ‘I’m so indignant, I’m gonna throw the cellphone down!’
The character, voiced by radio engineer Dave Wernham, made a report known as I’m So Angry which bought to No 90 within the charts in August 1985.
‘Mr Angry was actually based on a real-life character,’ Wright revealed, ‘who used to work on the technical side in a TV studio.
Wright joined the BBC in the 1970s and went on to present across BBC Radio 1 and 2 for more than four decades
‘But he was also a satire on the suburban anger of the 1980s.’
Other favourites included the wildly camp Gervais the hairdresser (‘Keep your tongue out!’) and Sid the supervisor (‘Hello boy’) who was shamelessly copied from Sid James’s character on Hancock’s Half Hour.
Impressionist Phil Cornwell would provide exaggerated impersonations of David Bowie and Mick Jagger, spoofing the concept superstars would flip up on the studios to listen to their data being performed.
Many of the catchphrases acquired manic lives of their very own. ‘Get some therapy!’ Wright favored to yell, after studying out an unlikely piece of trivia. Another one was, ‘He’s all Wright,’ which started as a horrible pun and have become a crazed bellow, one thing to blurt when there was nothing else to be stated.
With the road between actuality and delirium already blurred, it was pure that technical employees could be dragged in as characters themselves. Producer Jonathan Ruffle grew to become Happening Boy, in addition to supplying voices for The Pervy and Dr Fish Filleter.
As their roles expanded, Wright started to discuss with his gang as The Posse. This was the start of ‘zoo radio’, a hyped-up cacophony of competing voices.
Chris Evans adopted the format for his breakfast present and scooped hatfuls of awards, but it surely was Wright who invented it.
By 1988, he was attracting 7.2 million listeners a day. Not everybody liked him: The Smiths wrote their scathing tune Panic as a protest in opposition to Wright’s tendency to observe grim information bulletins with bubblegum pop hits. ‘Hang the blessed DJ,’ Morrissey sang, ‘Because the music that they constantly play, It says nothing to me about my life’ — earlier than launching right into a chant of, ‘Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ’.
In 1994, following a schmoozey breakfast with Radio 1 controller Matthew Bannister at The Savoy, Wright moved to the morning slot. But he didn’t settle — he loathed the strict restrictions on the playlist and his madcap humour sounded compelled at the moment of day.
After greater than 4 million listeners abandoned, he stop and moved to Talk Radio.
But he was again on the Beeb a 12 months later, in 1996, this time on Radio 2. Here he stayed, happening to current his afternoon present for 23 years.
One of his perennial options have been the Factoids, snippets of trivia that have been typically true, typically jokes — and it was as much as listeners to inform the distinction. ‘Clint Eastwood wore the same boots in the 1994 movie Unforgiven as he had 30 years earlier in the TV show Rawhide,’ was one in every of his extra believable claims.
‘Noddy Holder has watched Cabaret more than 100 times,’ was much less plausible however enabled Wright to quip: ‘How many times has Liza Minnelli seen Slade?’
Wright married U.S.-born Cyndi Robinson in 1985 and so they had two kids, Tom and Lucy. He as soon as stated he realised he was in love whereas they have been sitting collectively watching tv. ‘I just looked at her and thought, “I love this woman.”’
But his lengthy working hours and single-minded concentrate on work took a toll, and he was taken unexpectedly in 1999 when she introduced the wedding was over.
‘It came out of the blue,’ a pal stated. ‘He thought they were for ever.’
Despite the craziness of his broadcasting fashion, Wright was a creature of routine. He was introduced up in Greenwich, South London, the older of two boys in a family the place cash was tight. His father Dickie, a tailor, was the supervisor of a Burton swimsuit retailer on Trafalgar Square.
Moving to Southend-on-Sea, he was mocked at college for his lengthy nostril and nicknamed Concorde.
He left with three O-levels and took a job in marine insurance coverage earlier than quitting at 19 to change into an area newspaper reporter. This ultimately took him to the BBC.
Some of his Radio 1 colleagues embraced tv however Wright was uncomfortable on display. He tried a BBC1 chat present within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, interviewing Take That, Ian Wright and Reeves and Mortimer, but it surely flopped after one season.
He was equally ill-equipped to adapt to single life after the break-up. His hair began to fall out and he piled on weight.
Instead of on the lookout for recent relationships, he withdrew into himself, spending longer than ever on the studio and retreating after work to a small bachelor pad, a couple of minutes’ stroll away.
Sometimes, unable to face going there, he would ask studio assistants to ebook him a room on the St George’s Hotel on Regent Street, even nearer to the BBC.
Staff additionally booked an everyday practice ticket for his Friday journeys to Oxted in Surrey to see his mom.
But the working joke at Broadcasting House was his unbending alternative of meals, delivered to him by workplace juniors. For breakfast he needed poached or scrambled eggs on brown toast from Avella’s cafe on Mortimer Street, with a baked potato at exactly 1.30pm from the identical place. The chef, Pete, knew how the DJ favored it — all of the assistant needed to say was: ‘It’s for Steve.’
Other favourites have been a hen pie from Eat, a chilli hen from Leon and a sausage sandwich, additionally from Eat. Variations on these fast- meals favourites weren’t welcomed. ‘Steve’s consuming habits have change into the stuff of legend on the Beeb,’ stated one insider in 2011. ‘He hates it when the broadcasting assistants get it wrong.’
The mixture of a sedentary job and a gentle provide of meals noticed his weight balloon to 18st. Fans who remembered him as a supermodel of a person within the Eighties, all legs and arms, have been alarmed to see his triple chins in later life. With the lack of his Radio 2 job got here the lack of these routines.
He was bereft to depart his afternoon present and his sign-off was each heartfelt and heartbreaking: ‘I want to say thank you to you for your appreciation, our dearest listeners, smashing and loyal, for all the reaction and all the nice words. Thank you if you’ve ever seen your technique to listening to us at any time. Thank you, thanks and thanks once more.
‘Corny though it sounds, I quite like the way that we’ve all helped one another get by means of a few of our ongoing issues collectively — the pandemic, the monetary downturns, the ups and downs of life within the UK. Sometimes it’s been very troublesome for everyone.’
As he choked up, he spun his closing discs — Bad Blood by Taylor Swift, maybe a touch at how he felt he’d been betrayed by the BBC, then Queen’s Radio Gaga… a love tune to the medium that was his life.
‘Everything I had to know, I heard it on my radio. You made ’em giggle, you made ’em cry, You made us really feel like we may fly… radio!’