Obituary - Steve Wright
13 February 2024
Steve Wright was so obsessed with radio that in the long-distant days
before the internet, he once flew to New York for the sole purpose of
sitting in a hotel room and listening to as many local stations as he
could in order to pick up tips and ideas.
It was a smart move. On his BBC Radio 1 show Steve Wright in the
Afternoon he pioneered what came to be known as the zoo format, an idea
imported from American radio that combines spinning discs with zany
humour, guests and interviews and heavily dominated by the exuberant
personality of the disc jockey with his own supporting claque or posse
in the studio.
Wright’s show, which was launched in 1981, featured a cast of spoof
characters such as Mr Angry, Sid the Manager, Mr Spoons and the Gay
Cavalieros as the music mingled with outlandish news stories and other
comic interludes. Other characters included Gervais the Hairdresser and
Pretentious Music Journalist. He wrote many of his own sketches for his
shows and provided some of the character voices.
Inspired by his mentor Kenny Everett, Wright’s watchword was irreverence
and his madcap style earned him more than eight million listeners. In
his wake the zoo format took over the airwaves and presaged the arrival
at Radio 1 of DJs such as Simon Mayo and Chris Moyles.
It was also credited with marking the beginning of the end for the old
guard of more traditionally minded DJs who had joined Radio 1 on its
inception in 1967. Julie Burchill, writing in the Modern Review, called
him “the first postmodernist on radio”.
Wright’s shows had a wider impact on pop culture, too. Morrissey and
Johnny Marr of the Smiths were listening to his show one afternoon in
1986 when, immediately after a report breaking the news about a nuclear
disaster at Chernobyl, Wright cheerily played I’m Your Man by Wham!.
“I remember saying, ‘What the f*** has this got to do with people’s
lives?’” Marr recalled. “We hear about Chernobyl, then, seconds later,
we’re expected to jump around to I’m Your Man.”
Morrissey then wrote the lyrics to Panic, one of the Smiths’ finest
songs, on which he sang, “Panic on the streets of London/ Panic on the
streets of Birmingham/ I wonder to myself/ Could life ever be sane
again?” The record concluded with Morrissey and a children’s choir
singing “Hang the DJ”.
Panic reached No 11 in the UK charts and also served as an acerbic
attack on the state of 1980s pop music. To promote the record, the group
commissioned a T-shirt with the phrase “Hang the DJ” above a portrait of
Wright, who seldom if ever played the Smiths’ records on his show.
“Morrissey hardly needed provocation to attack Wright, whose highly
ranked afternoon show treated all popular music as secondary to his
madcap party format,” noted Tony Fletcher, author of A Light That Never
Goes Out, a biography of the Smiths. Wright sensibly took it as a
compliment and even bought one of the T-shirts.
Five years later Steve Wright in the Afternoon spawned another hit
single, with the 1991 novelty song I’ll Be Back. Attributed to Arnee and
the Terminaters and subtitled The Dancefloor Devastation Kick-Up, it was
written and produced by members of Wright’s on-air posse and parodied
Arnold Schwarzenegger with lyrics such as “it’s not that I’m
ill-mannered or a psychopathic hater, I just like to be treated right
like any Terminator”.
Steve Wright in the Afternoon ran from 1981 to 1993. Wright and his crew
then took over the Radio 1 Breakfast Show for 15 months, before he
resigned following a row with the station’s new radio controller,
Matthew Bannister, and was replaced by Chris Evans.
He briefly went to commercial radio but returned to the BBC on Radio 2
in 1996 to present a Saturday show and Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs.
He handed over the Saturday show to Jonathan Ross in 1999 when Radio 2
revived Steve Wright in the Afternoon, which he continued to present
until 2022 with such quirky features as the Ask Elvis segment (“Dear
Elvis, how do you make gravy without lumps?” was one memorable
question), the mysterious “Old Woman” and his famous “factoids”.
In 2019 he was listed as the BBC’s fifth highest-earning presenter, with
an income between £465,000 and £469,000 — and that was after an £85,000
pay cut the previous year as part of a BBC drive to iron out male and
female salary differences.
He presented his Sunday Love Songs show for 28 years and it was still on
air at the time of his death, having survived a minor tabloid “scandal”
when in 2013 it was revealed that the show, presented as if it was going
out live, was pre-recorded on Fridays.
The BBC Trust’s editorial standards committee issued a rap over the
knuckles for breaching guidelines on accuracy and audience interaction,
but it did not dent the show’s popularity.
Featuring a mix of classic love songs, dedications and real-life love
stories, it was billed as the most romantic show on British radio, but
Wright admitted that it left him no time for a romantic life of his own
or to find a new partner after his marriage to his American-born wife
Cyndi Robinson ended in divorce in 1999.
“I work on an afternoon show on the BBC and I do a love songs show at
the weekend, and it means that I do a lot of interviews and I prep a lot
and I write a lot. So I have to work all the time,” he told the Daily
Mirror.
He and Robinson met as journalists on the Berkshire Chronicle in the
1970s, lost touch and got back together in the 1980s. In the days before
mobile phones, he proposed to her on air while she was driving and she
asked the AA to phone in to his show with her affirmative answer.
He remembered fondly the moment when it had occurred to him that he
could not live without her. “We were watching the Mike Leigh play
Abigail’s Party on television when I looked at her and just thought: ‘I
love this woman’,” he said.
He immediately told her of his feelings and recalled her reply was
something along the lines of “Shut up. I’m watching the telly.” It did
not quite have the romance of the stories he recounted on Sunday Love
Songs, but friends felt they were made for each other and were surprised
when out of the blue she walked out of their Henley-on-Thames mansion.
The break-up was said to have hit him hard.
He moved into a bachelor flat in central London, above a garage where he
kept a black Range Rover and was a few minutes walk from Broadcasting
House. There was also a country house in West Sussex, where he was
sometimes seen driving a yellow Lotus sports car.
He is survived by his son Tom, who at one time dated Sadie Frost and was
part of Amy Winehouse’s circle, and his daughter Lucy. Off-air he was
surprisingly shy and reserved. He enjoyed his privacy and, despite a
brief spell presenting Top of the Pops, eschewed a career in television
in order to be able to go about his daily life unrecognised.
Regarded as something of an enigma by BBC colleagues, he was seldom seen
at celebrity events and at the end of a day’s work was content with a
takeaway or a microwave dinner and a mini bottle of wine alone at home.
Stephen Richard Wright was born in 1954 in Greenwich, south London, and
grew up in the gritty urban environs of nearby New Cross. His father,
Richard “Dickie” Wright, was a tailor with the high street clothing
chain Burton and there was never much money. He recalled that as late as
the early 1960s, the family home had no proper bathroom and ablutions
were in a tin bath.
He had a younger brother, Laurence, and the family later moved to
Southend-on-Sea, where he attended Eastwood High School and was
nicknamed “Big Nose” and “Concorde” by his classmates. With the classic
“good face for radio”, his main achievement at school was a show which
he broadcast to fellow pupils over the speaker system from the stock
cupboard. He left with three O-levels, unable to understand the point of
Greek mythology or algebra and impatient “to start earning money”.
Three years as a clerk with a marine insurer in the City bored him rigid
until a post as a trainee junior reporter on the Berkshire Chronicle
offered an escape route. This led to his employment by the BBC as a
clerk, logging the discs in and out in what was still called the
corporation’s gramophone library.
He left in 1976 to host his first show at the age of 22 on Radio
Atlantis and then on Thames Valley Radio in Reading, Berkshire,
alongside his future Radio 1 colleague Mike Read.
His big break into national broadcasting came in 1979 at Radio
Luxembourg, where he spent six months presenting his own nightly show
before he was headhunted by BBC Radio 1. His secret ambition, he once
admitted, was to have a programme on Radio 4.
Steve Wright MBE, DJ, was born on August 26, 1954. He died of
undisclosed causes on February 12, 2024, aged 69.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/steve-wright-obituary-death-s7b3cm7qm
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