It was a few Sundays ago when I woke up at the unusually-early-for-me weekend time of quarter to ten. Bleary, I switched on the radio (or rather, clicked the link on my laptop – what a time to be alive, eh?) and heard an item about Terry Wogan. After a few seconds, I snapped myself wide awake with what would be the first of several troubling thoughts that day:
“Oh God, please don’t refer to him in the past tense.”
As if cued just for me, the presenter did just that, immediately adding “If you’ve just tuned in, broadcaster Terry Rogan has died aged 77”.
My antennae for such things had been high, as January 2016 had already proved itself to be a wretched month for fans of Starmen or perfectly-pitched movie villains. But news of Wogan’s passing hit me by far the hardest. I’ve wanted to be on television and radio since I can remember, (I start to talk quicker as the intro to a song finishes so I don’t talk over the lyrics and often think about what style of music my house band would play) and Terry Wogan was my chosen industry’s top practitioner all my life. From cartoons he narrated, quizzes and chat shows he hosted, telethons he marshalled, Eurovisions he scoffed and days he brought to a gentle start playing Eva Cassidy, he was hardly ever out of sight or earshot.
But as I sat listening to the deluge of tributes on BBC Radio 2 through that morning, my already sorrowful mood darkened. Not only had I lost someone I admired, who meant so much to so many and had such a full career, but I suddenly became wracked with fear that I’d never get anywhere close to following his example. Before long, I was in the grip of a full-on crisis of confidence: “Oh God”, I thought. “Even when he was my age Terry was never off the air. What the hell am I even doing with my life? ”
It’s a refrain a lot of us have reverberating round our heads more and more these days. Long before the aforementioned David Bowie’s recent death, there was a popular website where you typed in your date of birth, and it told you of some ridiculous achievement of his when he was your age. Much of the rest of the modern world conspires to make you take pessimistic stock of your life, and how it’s going relative to everyone else’s too.
An increasingly splintered and merciless job market makes people who want careers into job hunter-gatherers; not only is it much harder to get secure employment, you likely have to earn a few degrees to even get there. Getting an affordable place to live is more difficult still. A lot of time is spent pondering on the fact that your parents were probably in a steady job for yonks, had the house bought and had already put two kids through First Communion by the time you’ve managed to save enough to move out. Looking at Social Media doesn’t help either: if you were to take heed of everything on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you’d be forgiven for thinking everybody else’s life was so filled with sexy adventures and general fulfilment that you may as well not even bother putting on socks in the morning.
And even when you are doing well, there’s no magic switch that converts you over to “You’ve Made It, You Can Relax Now” mode. If anything, you pile more pressure on yourself to build on your advantage. And if that doesn’t hit you, then something even more insidious will: enter Imposter Syndrome, a very modern phenomenon born of the scars of too many rejected applications you’ve poured your heart into that never even get the grace of a response. When you eventually do succeed you assume it’s some dreadful error, and a SWAT team are on the way up to bust in the doors and drag you from your post any moment now. Well, maybe not a SWAT team. HR, maybe. Whatever the acronym, the feeling your shameful inadequate secret is about to be blown pervades this generation. But we don’t need to be prisoners to it.
Hearing tributes to Wogan made me sad in so many ways, and had me questioning my own ability to follow a similar path to him. But the more tributes I heard, the more it brought me out of the sadness. The praise from his legions of fans uniformly mentioned that Wogan was such a success because he was himself, nothing more or less. He was able to live a fantastic life and touch many others simply by being secure enough in the ground below him not to rush, or run away from himself. Everyone who wants to speak into a microphone for a living owes Terry a great debt: he was a master of his craft. But he also trusted his gut and his route in life, and that trust in himself paid off over and over. Of all the lessons he unknowingly taught me over the years, that was the best.