Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1988 and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is something of a stranger to radio. He hasn't sat behind one of its

microphones for nearly four years. Nevertheless, he managed this week to get himself elected the

most popular radio personality of the past two decades. He deserted radio for television,

which has never been slow to recognise his talents. There he's been voted its most popular

personality every year for the past ten. So who is this fatal attraction of the airwaves?

Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you Desert Island Discs

1,914th cast away, Michael Terrence Wogan.

Welcome, what a welcome. You must have a special room, Terry, to put all these awards in at home.

Yes, the old sideboard is groaning under it a little bit and they make excellent door stops as well.

I think it's very important not to attach a great deal of importance to things like that. You've

got to apply the kippling-esque motif of treating triumph and disaster just the same because

there will come a time when you don't win polls. So if you don't put much credence on them

when you actually win them, then it doesn't matter when you begin to lose them because there's

nothing more certain. You can't possibly keep winning and winning and winning. But tell me,

if someone had told empty Wogan Esquire when he was 18 years old and a bank clerk in Dublin

that one day he would win all those awards, he would be Britain's top media personality.

What would he have said? If I had any intimations then of what was going to happen to me now,

I probably wouldn't have done it because I'm not tremendously extrovert by nature.

And if somebody had said to me, you're going to be so well-known that you really can't walk

...