Radio is my favourite medium. Always has been. It doesn’t shout ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ in the way newspapers and screens do. Radio informs and entertains as you drive a car, paint a ceiling or perform open-heart surgery. And there was no finer, more creative and more enduring radio entertainer than Steve Wright, who died on Monday.
His afternoon show made Radio 1 in the 1980s. When Wright moved to Radio 2 in the late 1990s, it was a stroke of genius by the station’s then controller Jim Moir, reviving Steve’s – and Radio 2’s – anarchic glory. There, The Big Show remained a hugely popular and always evolving stalwart of the schedule.
One wonders what Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, will make of all this
That was until the current controller, Helen Thomas, made one of the Corporation’s most egregious errors of recent years: she axed Steve Wright. It wasn’t the first time she’d applied her ‘if it ain’t broke, break it’ approach to Radio 2.
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