Television

Wogan's Web

Wogan's Web was good. In fact, it was possibly the funniest programme ever on British television. There's been nothing else quite like it, before or since.

It was a simple concept - essentially Terry's Radio 2 breakfast show transferred to the telly, And so what you got was the kind of knockabout fun and spontaneity common in radio, but virtually unheard of in television (the only other example that springs to mind is the Children's BBC broom cupboard).

It ran each lunchtime on BBC1 throughout May 1998, and was a refreshing change from the usual dirge of daytime chat and lifestyle programmes. It featured all of Wogan's usual Radio 2 cohorts - his producer Pauly Walters, sat at a desk to his left, smurfing the web and picking up e-mails; Deadly Alancoat on voiceover duties; plus Tel's Belles taking phone calls to his right.

There were various guests and topics along the way - mainly very trivial ones like garden gnomes - but the best bits were simply Terry (fresh back from hosting Eurovision that year) engaging in banter with his team, and reading amusing e-mails and faxes from viewers. In my opinion, this was by the far the best vehicle for Terry's talents, perfectly suiting his style of humour and presentation, much more so than his long running BBC1 chat show for example. I couldn't stop laughing for a single second of it.

Yet it was an all too brief run. After just twenty programmes, Wogan's Web came to an end and never returned. Was it too good for daytime television? Or was it too good for daytime radio? It seems Terry was taking his Radio 2 audience with him to BBC1, causing Jimmy Young's ratings to suffer!

The Terry and Gaby Show

In June 2003, almost exactly five years after Wogan's Web bit the dust, Terry returned to daytime television. However this time he defected to Channel 5 - sorry, 'five' - to co-present The Terry and Gaby Show with Gaby Roslin. Like another of five's recent shows, Live with Chris Moyles/Christian O'Connell, it was a Chris Evans production, and in parts this manifesteds itself very obviously.

TTAGS aired each morning from 11.00 (giving Terry just 90 minutes between coming off air at Broadcasting House, and going on air at the old County Hall building by the River Thames). As with Wogan's Web, the best parts of the new show were the reading of viewers' amusing e-mails and letters. Another BBC legend Johnny Ball made a daily appearance on the show (he was later replaced by Danny Baker); a celebrity guest joins Terry and Gaby on the sofa (on the first day it was another face of the BBC, Jonathan Ross, giving the show a very BBC-feel on its first day); and the show also contained similiar kinds of lowbrow, trivial features that were seen on Wogan's Web.

However, bearing in mind that Mr Wogan himself was the main draw to this show for the majority of the viewers, the chief drawback was that it contained a number of very un-Woganesque features. For example, he admitted on his Radio 2 show that he had no idea who the guest had been on the previous morning's television show. (I hadn't heard of him either - some bloke from an American sitcom). Then there were some typical Chris Evans-type competitions such as 'Kids in Headphones' and one in which an excitable Scouse bloke (Danny McCall) went round to people's houses and buys things off them in order to give them away on the Friday show. All of this sat uneasily with the Wogan style of humour and presentation.

Indeed, in the first Friday culmination of the Danny McCall feature, Terry seemed to show little interest in this frantic phone-in competition that was going on around him, wandering off looking for a drink. Having failed to find one he went to peer out of the window for a bit, before wandering back to the sofa muttering 'Are we still doing this?'. He then got lumbered with the job of giving prizes out to the audience.

Terry and Gaby never reached the same cult status as Wogan's Web, and neither did it pull in the ratings. After the initial commission for 200 programmes, the axe swiftly fell on The Terry and Gaby Show. The final programme aired on 26th March 2004.

Television
Eurovision