Britain's 'favourite Irishman' on a personal tour of Ireland

SMALL PRINT:On Sunday night, Terry Wogan will bring BBC viewers on a trip around his homeland, he tells MARK HENNESSY,London Editor

WONDERFULLY-TAKEN film of Irish beauty spots accompanied by the voice of Terry Wogan: Tourism Ireland is, no doubt, betting that Terry Wogan's Ireland– the first of two episodes of which will air on BBC 1 on Sunday night – will provide a much-needed fillip for Ireland's tourism trade.

“Now that I am semi-retired, I have time for these things,” says Wogan, who still attracts an audience measured in millions for his Sunday BBC Radio 2 show. “It is a personal tour of Ireland. The main idea is to identify the similarities and differences between our two peoples.”

The filming was conducted in May, June and July: “I make the point at the beginning that Ireland is going through difficult times, but that the spirit of the people is such that they will not be counted out. Things were not as economically disastrous when we were shooting it as they became later, so I had to ‘tweak’ the voice-overs a little bit later on, but I didn’t want this to be a depressing thing.”

Often described as Britain’s favourite Irishman, Wogan began his association with the BBC with a late-night programme before he stood in for veteran broadcaster, Jimmy Young in late 1969 during the latter’s summer holidays. He then got an afternoon slot on BBC Radio One in 1970.

Most recently, Wogan was announced as a member of the panel of the BBC Radio 4 comedy show Just a Minute, which returns to the airwaves on February 7th.

During his career, he has stayed away from politics and the Troubles, though he surprised many last November at the Irish Embassy at a reception to honour Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall when he said: “People are a little depressed by the appalling economic situation but these are a people who have been through privation, starvation, oppression, discrimination, emigration, and they still come up smiling and singing.”

Questioned about the prince’s reaction, Wogan said: “Well, he didn’t contradict me, which was good. It is significant, though, that Prince Charles has spent so much time in Ireland. The Irish and the English, despite a terrible history, are much closer than the English and the Scots and the English and the Welsh.”

Travelling to Ireland on Sundays after his radio show was completed, Wogan began with a journey on the high-speed ferry journey to Dún Laoghaire, “on which we were stranded for an hour in a mist”.

After filming in Dublin, he travelled down the east coast to Ballinspittle, the scene of alleged Marion apparitions in 1985. There he spoke to "very sensible" locals who still swear that the grotto statue moved back then. In Cork, "we visited a fantastic little pub called the Hi-B" and in his home town of Limerick, some old school friends had been gathered "so there was a touch of Who Do You Think You Areabout all of it".

Though not a stranger to the city in the years since he left, Wogan traversed old grounds. He and his friends had attended the Jesuit-run Crescent before the Wogan family moved to Dublin when he was 15: “It is an extraordinary thing that people don’t change. Even though I left there a long time ago, they still had the same characteristics that they had back then.”

In Galway, hundreds gathered during filming outside the King’s Head pub on High Street, said to have been the reward for the man who executed King Charles I. “A Wogan took part in that regicide,” said the broadcaster. But he, Thomas Wogan, was later to flee to the Netherlands after the Restoration.

The journey across the Border, which included a boat trip with Fr Brian D’Arcy on Lough Erne, is proof, he says, of the changes for the better the past 40 years have brought: “The fantastic thing is that all the watchtowers are gone, the soldiers patrolling. All that is left are the bureaux de change, with one side crossing to get cheaper petrol and the other to get cheaper shopping.”

The first in the two-part series, Terry Wogan's Ireland,is on BBC1 at 9pm on Sunday