Breaking rules was ‘in his DNA’, widow of Johnnie Walker says

The widow of late broadcaster Johnnie Walker said breaking the rules was “in his DNA” and wept on live TV as she spoke of hearing his voice again.

Tiggy Walker told BBC Breakfast she was emotional after being shown his exit from his last-ever BBC Radio 2 show in October.

He died two months later.

Host Naga Munchetty said: “I’m sorry to start the interview off making you cry.”

Mrs Walker, who has written a book: Johnnie Walker – Both Sides Now, said she was commissioned to write it before his death and he immediately offered to write a foreword for it.

She told BBC Breakfast: “What is more, what is even lovelier, is for the audio version. He recorded that.

“So for people who go for the audiobook, they will hear him say those lines and he sounds pretty dreadful because it was in the last month or so of his life, but it’s just so lovely.

“A lot of, half, the book is about his final year and I was writing during the year.

“For me, it was therapy, you know, it was if it had been a particularly hard day looking after him, I’d get into bed and tuck him down like a baby, really, and I’d go to go to my room and just start typing.

“It was, just, it just let me let off steam, cathartic.”

Describing Walker as “rock and roll”, she added: “Johnny wanted to break rules. That was just in his DNA.”

She said she had tried to get him to stop smoking but he refused.

“Eventually the palliative nurse went, ‘Tiggy, you’re never, ever gonna change him’,” she added.

“But she was furious when she heard he was smoking, she said he could blow up because he’s on full-time oxygen.”