That's quite enough Wigon

Victor Lewis-Smith hates Wogan's 'flabby approach to TV'

11 April 2012

Did you know that every minute you spend exercising will, on average, add one extra minute to your life expectancy? Great. So regular visits to the gym throughout your adult lifetime could eventually enable your wobbly octogenarian self to spend an additional four months on this earth, staring vacantly at the ceiling of a small room in a nursing home on the south coast, at the cost of only £3,000 per month.

That grim realisation might explain why the only exercise I've ever bothered to extract from the keep-fit cycle I purchased last year was when I carried it from the shop to my car and thence to my garage, where it now sits quietly turning to rust. And alongside it is the Slimwheel exerciser that I stopped using years ago, because it left such deep ridges in my rug that New Age travellers would knock at my door, demanding to take photos of the mysterious crop circles that had formed in my Axminster.

Terry Wogan obviously abandoned his unequal struggle to "fight the flab" some time ago, but watching yesterday morning's edition of

The Terry and Gaby Show (C5) set me thinking about rugs and cycles. Well, I've heard that his collection of hair hats has long conformed to a quintic cycle, with week 1 (short back and sides) giving way to week 2 (just over the ears), week 3 ( coming on nicely), week 4 (getting a bit straggly), and week 5 (time to get week 1 out of the box again).

Earlier this month, C5 pulled the rug from under him by passing a death sentence on his ailing, failing show (execution will take place on 26 March), thereby consigning it to the same media oblivion as his previously axed TV disasters, from Lunchtime with Wogan and Wogan's Web to Wogan's Island and Wogan's Friday Night.

Indeed, it was appropriate that yesterday's show briefly featured a 1950s Archie Andrews ventriloquist doll, and for a moment my screen was filled with the rare sight of two old dummies who have been unaccountably popular on the radio, but never on television.

Despite executive producer Chris Evans's desperate attempts to make his ersatz Regis and Kathie Lee format work in Britain, the Nineties-style TFI Friday freneticism failed to inject energy into what has now become a televisual hospice (only without the jokes).

"I couldn't source any good ones," said an antiques expert limply as he explained why the worthless corkscrews he'd brought along to show us were either mass-produced tat or else had bits missing, and that same lack of care was evident throughout the show.

An actor who performed card tricks badly kept telling us (unnecessarily) that "I'm not a professional magician", while the "Kids in Headphones" quiz was hardly a cryptic brain-teaser (it featured a child faultlessly reciting the opening lines of Ticket to Ride), and it wasn't hard to see why 10 times as many viewers prefer ITV1's This Morning to this ill-formed stream-of-unconsciousness.

"You can weigh sunlight ... and smoke," we were irrelevantly told at one point, and although we were never informed how, I'd be prepared to bet that both would turn out to be more substantial than this programme.

Speaking of sunlight, there was one ray of hope when the mercurial Danny Baker popped up, modestly occupying the role of sidekick, even though he clearly ought to be fronting the show. In its dying days, he's taken over the Johnny Ball role as the font of all knowledge, and answered questions about his specialist subject (" deepcrust pizza"), although he did slip up when claiming that a Margherita "has yellow cheese, red tomatoes, and green peppers, in the colours of the Italian flag" - the Italian flag is white, red and green.

Apart from his shafts of wit, the only other highlights were in the hair of Miriam, a girl who turned out to be a man, and had already told her Sky-dating-show story to every other media outlet that could be bothered to cover it. Which was why, when Baker pointed to the surprisingly large studio audience and said "we'd only sold 11 tickets, then it started to snow and now we've got a full house", it was too close to the truth to be funny.

"This is not like one of those other shows that sets out to depress you," Mr Wigon told us at one point, but while it may not have that as a specific ambition, that's nevertheless precisely what it achieves.

I don't mind the presenter's flabby thighs (his flabby stomach covers them), but I do detest his flabby approach to television, and the "steady me hearties" schtick which he still continues to mistake for wit.

It's well-nigh impossible to dislike Gaby Roslin (she's too bland to arouse any emotion), but I've become heartily sick of Wogan's lazy presentational style, and it now seems that TV controllers are wising up to him too, and to Chris Evans, whose shows always promise so much, yet seldom deliver.

Which is why I calculate that the chances of Wogan and Evans getting another major commission are about as good as their chances of surviving a weekend in the cage of a half-starved panther, after first smearing themselves in Bovril.

Perhaps they'd like to try it, so we can calculate the odds for ourselves.

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