Steve Wright, who has died aged 69, presented the anarchist breakfast show on Radio 1 for a year before moving to Radio 2, where he became a chatty fixture on weekday afternoons with mainstream pop hits, interviews and features. with interjections from his regular group of equally articulate subordinates, a format that became known as ‘zoo radio’.
When he suddenly left Radio 1 in January 1995, Wright was said to be heading to Talk Radio, Britain’s first national commercial station, and was widely expected to be followed out the door by the controller of the BBC’s pop network Matthew Bannister, whose station had lost 4.5 million listeners the previous year.
Wright’s unhappy year on the breakfast show was seen as a casualty of the changes Bannister made to Radio 1 when he took over the station in 1993 and, at the insistence of the ascetic director general John Birt, introduced more speech content.
“Steve Wright stopped being fun when he brought his gang onto the breakfast show and talked to them more than to us,” complained radio critic Gillian Reynolds of the Telegraph. “Radio 1 let him run wild. A great shame, a waste.”
Wright was widely regarded as a clever operator at the microphone, the most inventive since his idol Kenny Everett. “However, he is not smart enough to stop reminding us how smart he is,” she added.
While Bannister survived, Wright’s abrupt departure caused a shock at Radio 1. He had been installed on the breakfast show in early 1994 to revive poor ratings following the removal of the station’s aging disc jockeys such as Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates.
After giving up his place on the breakfast show to Chris Evans after just over a year, Wright did indeed leave for Talk Radio, but listeners did not accept him and he left after a few months, returning to the BBC in 1996 with two weekends . shows on Radio 2 featuring ‘amazing’ facts (later renamed ‘factoids’), celebrity gossip, royal banter, TV soap stars, horoscopes and travel news.
His hugely popular Sunday morning show, Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs, featured genre classics, devotions and real-life stories of romance.
In 1999, he took over from Ed “Stewpot” Stewart on the Weekday Afternoon, which was relaunched under the title The Big Show. With him went his zoo staff, and a host of characters played by Wright himself, most notably Mr Angry, who ranted on the phone from Purley.
Like Kenny Everett, Wright had an enduring obsession with radio, and he listened diligently to other shows in search of ideas. In the pre-internet age, he wouldn’t dream of taking a flight to New York to hole up in a hotel room for a weekend of listening to the radio.
At the height of his success, he lived with his American-born wife and their two children in a country house in Henley-on-Thames. But when his wife suddenly left him, Wright became known as something of an eccentric loner, sleeping in a small flat around the corner from Broadcasting House during the week and living frugally, despite a reported salary of more than £500,000, on a diet of microwaved TV dinners, mini bottles of white wine, crisps and chocolates.
Every now and then he would order the staff to book him for the night at the luxury hotel across the street. At the office, he sent a minion to queue for his train ticket to Surrey for weekend visits to his mother, while other subordinates were sent out to pick up sandwiches and junk food from local cafes. Over the years he struggled to control his weight, which sometimes rose to 18 stone.
Stephen Richard Wright, the eldest son of a tailor who ran Burton’s clothing stores in Trafalgar Square, was born on 26 August 1954 in Greenwich and grew up in New Cross. When the family moved to Essex he attended Eastwood High School, near Southend-on-Sea, leaving with just three O-levels, but after working in marine insurance and as a local newspaper reporter he fulfilled an ambition to work at the BBC by finding a job in the gramophone library at Radio 2.
His first appearance behind the microphone came in 1976 on Radio 210 in Reading (now Heart Thames Valley) alongside Mike Read on The Read and Wright Show.
After a dismal spell at Radio Luxembourg, he joined Radio 1 in 1980, presenting a Saturday evening show and then a Saturday morning programme, before moving to the afternoon from 1981. In 1984 he launched a Sunday morning show and two years later later returned to weekdays with Steve Wright in the afternoons.
The show became something of an institution, known for its outrageous cast of telephone characters, but these were later ditched in favor of a ‘zoo’ format, new to British radio, with parody guests and comedy sketches, a ‘troop’ of producers and radio staff did join in the banter.
In addition to Mr Angry, Wright’s on-air entourage included Gervase the hairdresser, Damian the social worker and Barry, the older lifestyle guru from Watford, usually played by actors.
In 1994, after being persuaded by Radio 1 controller Matthew Bannister during breakfast at the Savoy, Wright and his group moved to the breakfast show. It quickly became clear that the format didn’t work for the time of day; Wright sounded stale and habitually ignored the computer-generated music playlist. With the listening figures in freefall, he feared for his own reputation and told Bannister he wanted to quit.
His afternoon show on Radio 2 featured a series of non-stop oldies, interviews with celebrities (usually a television or film personality, or an author plugging a new book) and all sorts of nuggets of information that he preferred to call ‘factoids’.
Wright pre-recorded Sunday Love Songs on Friday, featuring traditional devotions, requests for partners in both gay and heterosexual relationships and various letters or emails from listeners, invariably including the mantra “Love the show, Steve”.
He announced his retirement from his weekday show at the age of 67 in July 2022, with the slot taken by Scott Mills, formerly of Radio 1, and in October last year he took over as host of Pick of the Pops from Paul Gambaccini .
Wright was bespectacled and nerdy and looked awkward on television, but presented Home Truths, The Steve Wright People Show (both 1994) and Auntie’s TV Favorites (1997), as well as Top of the Pops and the retro TOTP2 (1997–2009 ). .
He was appointed MBE for services to radio in the 2024 New Year Honours.
Steve Wright married Cyndi Robinson in 1985; they had a daughter and son, but divorced in 1999.
Steve Wright, born August 26, 1954, died February 12, 2024