How Steve Wright survived the brutal world of Radio 1

It is Tuesday, August 2 1983, a simpler world. It is long before the iPhone, streaming television, Spotify, podcasts or Radio 5. There are certainly no plans for something called Radio 2 Extra.

It is, instead, the day of the Radio 1 Roadshow live from the Scalby Mills Lawns, Scarborough, with your host David Jensen. Terrible things would ensue: sexism and diversity was not a consideration; the competition prizes were T-shirts and stickers; the DJs would sometimes end up in a speedboat being chased by another speedboat driven by a Womble.

In the hours before the hot delights of Scarborough, Radio 1 featured the breakfast show with Mike Read and the mid-morning ‘Our Tune’ show with Simon Bates. After Scarborough there were shows presented by Andy Peebles, Peter Powell, and a show called Frontline, billed tantalisingly if uncommittedly in the Radio Times as “Who…what…why…when…where?” At dinner time, Richard Skinner offered fewer japes but cooler music.

And in the midst of all this excitement, a seemingly immovable anchor in the schedule: a two-hour show hosted by Steve Wright. Combining a gentle blend of music, showbusiness interviews and the regular intrusion of a man so harmlessly angry that he ended his calls to the show by putting the phone down, Wright was the only one of those presenters to thrive on national BBC radio until his death earlier this week. What was his trick?

His trick was survival. Neither glamorous nor fashionable, and certainly not what the 1980s would have called trendy, he committed to his job much as a reliable actor or surgeon might commit to theirs. But the other trick was staying sane amongst the chaos and supersized egos. “Most of the DJs detested each other,’ Matthew Bannister, the former Controller of Radio 1, once told me. “Bates hated Wright because Wright was a threat. Wright hated Bates because Bates was a threat. They both hated DLT. The clashing of titanic egos was rather like Jurassic Park.”

You may find many clips of his shows online, and most are unremarkable and necessarily fleeting. And his lack of hipness now has its rebounds: for a long while his shows featured a fictitious camp hairdresser named Gervase. But occasionally the clips provide clues to his longevity.

In August 2019, for example, moments before he interviewed Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer about the simple joys of fishing, a studio discussion touched on the nightmare of digital alarm clocks. Did anyone know how to operate them? What was wrong with the old wind-up ones with the little bells at the top? Wasn’t much of the digital universe one huge headache? “What’s the point?” Wright concluded. There was a point, of course, the huge technological point of progress he seemed fairly content to pass him by. For that was his point: he was analogue.

I met Wright a few times, most memorably when I was writing my book The Nation’s Favourite, about the turbulent modernisation of Radio 1 in the 1990s. Out went the ‘dinosaurs’ such as Simon Bates and Dave Lee Travis, in came the younger, hipper crew such as Zoe Ball, Chris Evans and Tim Westwood. Faced with the granting of new radio licences to faster-moving competitors, and grumblings in parliament about what Radio 1 was for (and why the taxpayer should fund it), the station had to reinvent itself, and reaffirm its commitment as ‘the cultural on-ramp’ for young listeners to the broader values of BBC radio beyond the three-minute pop song.

Steve Wright’s ‘trick was staying sane amongst the chaos and supersized egos’ – Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo

The result was a dramatic decline in audience figures, a transformation too extreme and too sudden. Looking back, Wright had a sanguine view of things. “What happened at Radio 1 is like a sitcom. I was happy to be in the sitcom…[but] when you do a show you can’t think of the exact numbers of people tuning in and how it compares with the last figures – such thoughts are imposters.”

Wright left Radio 1 too at that time, but – tellingly – of his own volition. Some saw it as a betrayal. Andy Parfitt, who took over as Controller of Radio 1 a short while afterwards, saw it as a selfish act, but it also explains how Wright managed to protect himself. In the Telegraph yesterday, his friend Paul Gambaccini revealed how Wright called it “surfing the controllers”, the deft technique of giving each what they wanted without selling your soul. Few broadcasters negotiated the choppy waters so well, and his resignation at the top of his game made it much easier for Radio 2 to re-engage him a few years later.

“I think he cared mostly about what might happen to his reputation if he stayed and saw his listenership drop,” Parfitt said. “He was reading a lot of negative press about Radio 1 every day. He thinks, ‘I’m part of this, and not only am I part of it, but I’m actually their flagship show – me, Steve Wright, the most popular broadcaster in Britain.’” Parfitt compared it to a star striker leaving a football team when they’re battling relegation.

BBC radio DJs: Simon Bates, Gary Davies and Steve Wright – Douglas Doig/Express/Getty Images

Wright maintained a very realistic impression of his own worth, a summation applicable to his entire career. “Part of the success of the afternoon programme wasn’t the fact that we were postmodern and smart, it was that we were reliable and friendly. You could switch on wherever you were and be amused and have a friend. That sounds terribly pretentious, but it’s true: it’s comforting, it’s something nice, it’s upbeat, we tried only to reflect the good, the funny and the interesting.”

I was a guest on his Radio 2 show a couple of times, promoting other books. But Wright was too clever to let any guest get away with bald promotion – he knew his listeners wouldn’t want that. It was more of a circus than a zoo, a format he borrowed from presenters in the United States. You entered the ringleader’s tent, and you needed to meet his needs not yours, and perform to his tempo. Easily overlooked, but it helped greatly that he liked new music. John Peel once told me that another famous Radio 1 daytime DJ didn’t have records in his house because they created a lot of clutter.

Alongside Simon Mayo, I’ve always thought of him as the most natural of popular music broadcasters: there seemed to be very little gap between what he sounded like on or off the air (you don’t last as long as he did if it’s an act all the time). I’m not sure he’ll be remembered as ‘a legend’ in the manner of Jimmy Young, Terry Wogan, John Peel or Ken Bruce. His departure from the weekday afternoon schedules in 2022 wasn’t greeted with the kind of garment-tearing that accompanied the retirement or deaths of those other great friends on the radio.

But that friendship thing is – was – genuine. “What people remember is the time you got them through their depression, or the time you helped them with their exams,” he told me. “The time you helped them when their husband went to the Falklands, or the time it was really pissing down with rain and you were the only thing on the air that cheered them up – that’s why you broadcast. Everything else is unimportant. At the end of the day, it’s just entertainment. Nobody has a disease.”

Simon Garfield is the author of The Nation’s Favourite: the True Adventures of Radio 1

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