From hero to zero in three years, but no one epitomised the sixties more than Simon Dee
For many people who lived through this tumultuous decade Simon Dee epitomised the guy who had it all: his own Saturday evening chat show, viewing figures of 18 million, rubbing shoulders with anyone who was anyone in the 60s, having a hopelessly glamorous life, being paid a relative fortune (£250,000 when he defected to ITV, nearly £4 million today) and being known by everyone. Then it all disappeared, almost overnight. Where did it all go wrong? The general perception is that his huge ego got the better of him and made him too many powerful enemies, which is true to an extent. But there was more going on in Simon Dee’s broadcasting career than met the eye and even though he became a victim of his own success, it wasn’t always his fault and he became very much a casualty of the extremely limited media of the 60s and 70s.
Dee hosted one of the most popular programmes of the late 60s. BBC’s Dee Time‘s five series ran between 1967 and 1969 and broadcast 157 shows and subsequently on ITV with The Simon Dee Show in 1970. The format rarely changed, two or three guests to chat with Simon and a couple of musical guests to pad out the variety. At first it went out twice a week, on a Tuesday and Thursday, but as its popularity grew it reverted to just once a week on the greatly coveted Saturday tea-time slot, hence Saturday Dee Time! It was the first show of its type and at its peak attracted up to 18 million viewers, but, of course, there were only three channels then and, therefore, less competition. But that’s not to denigrate the influence and public profile of Dee Time. Anyone growing up in the late 60s would have watched Dee Time. The format may sound very conventional now but Dee Time featured pretty much anyone who was anyone during this groundbreaking period and aspects of the show, as well as Dee himself, demand some sort of analysis. For me, the highlight of Dee Time was not only the range of guests who dropped in ‘for a chat,’ and there was some very odd combinations of people indeed put before a Saturday tea-time audience, but also the who’s who of, often quite spectacular, 60s musical acts who regularly graced the studio.
Nicholas Henty-Dodd, aka Simon Dee, was born in Manchester in 1935 attending private school, obviously (who at the BBC in the 50s and 60s didn’t?) before doing his National Service then a series of dead end jobs before being recruited as a DJ for pirate Radio Caroline in 1964 courtesy of a friend who ran the station. He was eventually taken on by the pre-Radio One BBC in 1965 to present a programme called Midday Spin where he played new releases of ‘pop’ records. I’m always surprised, in a way, as to how so many 60s and 70s DJs just walked into these jobs without any apparent musical background or knowledge. Probably elderly producers just thought if someone was young, looked the part and could talk in a reasonably fluent manner they could do the job (See The Moronic World of 70s Radio One DJs below). But, to be fair to Dee, he was interested in music and this was reflected in the wide and varied styles of music he played on his show.
However, he fell foul of the management when he played Scott Walker’s brilliant version of Jacques Brel’s Jackie twice during one show, despite the song being bizarrely banned by the station. It may have been the references at various times to ‘opium dens,’ ‘ authentic queers’, and ‘phony virgins’ that worried the strait-laced Broadcasting House top brass, even although few people really listened to the lyrics. However, the great Scott Walker had already performed it all at peak viewing time on The Frankie Howerd Show on a less traditionally driven ITV at the same time. And it was this surreal juxtaposition of high art and downmarket variety, so redolent of the times, that made Dee Time such a strange experience. I have discussed at length the weirdness that was Sunday Night At The London Palladium (Tarbuck Memories: Sunday Night at the London Palladium below) and TV at the time was trying to cope with the biggest change to society since the Second World War, the explosion of 60s youth culture. TV was desperately attempting to keep its older, less demanding, viewers happy with more conventional fare while, at the same time, trying to attract the huge and growing teen viewership who wanted something very different. It was a precarious balancing act and Dee Time along with SNATLP tried to appeal to both markets often creating a curious vibe and decidedly odd viewing experience.
Strangely, Dee was spotted by BBC Light Entertainment executive Bill Cotton’s mother while he was advertising Smith’s Crisps on an ITV ad. Clearly Dee was well-known enough to be offered such a, presumably quite lucrative, gig. And after a perfunctory meeting with Cotton at the BBC, was propelled into the maelstrom that was the Sixties scene and his own TV chat show, despite having little or no experience of this medium. Luckily for him tea time chat shows were relatively new and no one really had anything else to compare him to.
The BBC desperately wanted Simon Dee to be the epitome of 60s glamour and despite some of Dee’s guests being resolutely of the entertainment old school, his opening and particularly his closing credits sequence were very definitely all about swinging London, even though the early shows were filmed in Manchester. The opening credits were nicked wholesale from The Johnny Carson Show with a disembodied voice (sports commentator Len Martin) bawling the names of tonight’s guests and finally announcing ‘Here’s your host, Siiiiiii-mon Dee!’
But the closing sequence was even better. After Dee had wished the viewing public goodnight the credits roll and we see him driving through a multi-storey car park in an open top white E-Type Jag. Waiting for him, and filmed from a low-angle to accentuate her model-like figure, is a dark- coated blonde in kinky boots, dressed a bit like The Girl From Uncle. She jumps into the car as it zooms off (and if you’re quick you’ll see her being rather unceremoniously knocked backwards by the power of the acceleration!). The camera follows the car round and round swinging ..erm… Manchester at high speed and from dizzying angles until the credits have rolled. And if that doesn’t yell ‘Sixties!’ I don’t know what will. Phew! The fact he was married with two children obviously wasn’t important, it was his image that really mattered.
It’s safe to say Dee was no Michael Parkinson. Never seen as a particularly fearsome interviewer, his style was laid-back, chummy and unthreatening to the point of trivial, but well suited to the early evening viewership. And there seemed little thought put into who should appear on any show. Guests were rarely selected to compliment each other or create a theme. It was more a case of ‘Who’s hot and available?’ Of course, it wasn’t possible for every show to feature a ‘happening’ interviewee or musical act and certain shows featured some unlikely bedfellows. Unlike Parkinson where the final part of the show was for all the guests to get together for a discussion, the vast majority of guests on Dee Time were interviewed alone. As is the case with so many TV shows of the time, only one complete Dee Time has survived with a few odd sections of others. For once it wasn’t a case of all the shows being wiped to save money, but all shows were live and, for some reason, probably to save money, just weren’t recorded. When some of Dee’s guests are considered, however, this was an omission just as culturally reprehensible. Because of this there is some debate as to who appeared on which show and even as to who was just there for a chat and who was performing. If the shows themselves weren’t deemed worthy of preservation, it’s unlikely many production notes or schedules were kept. There are discrepancies, for example, between IMDB and Richard Wiseman’s fascinating account of Dee’s career, ‘Whatever Happened To Simon Dee?‘ In most cases I’ve relied on the latter but, either way, the list of guests Dee attracted was an A-Z of the sixties.
Although a number of clips from shows still exist, though precious few, one of only two known episodes still in existence would appear to be from November 2 1968. How this episode survived is unknown. The opening routine shows Dee standing in a cloak looking superior. Clearly this was a ‘happening’ item of fashion featured in the tabloids that week which had garnered some ridicule. ‘We’re all wearing them,’ he haughtily declared. Then when an assistant came to take the cloak away Dee said ‘Can I have it off, please?’ Cue shrieks from the audience and Dee putting his fingernails in his mouth in shock at what he just said. Almost certainly scripted, this was the level of innuendo that made audiences guffaw guiltily in the 60s. Some things never change, I suppose.
His first guest is Graham Leask (Graham Leask, I hear you ask?), a young lad who exports snakes to Europe, according to Dee. Clearly a warm-up amuse-bouche before the main courses of Susannah York and Lionel Jeffries. A slightly awkward encounter ensues with Dee almost realising as he spoke that this was really pretty dull. It reminded me of the wonderful chat show spoof The Larry Sanders Show, when they were short of guests they’d bring in ‘The Sea-Shell Woman’ to eat up a bit of time by displaying the sea shells she’d collected while Larry struggled to feign interest. If Graham is still with us, and he’ll be around 65 now, he must be rather chuffed that his appearance on Dee Time is one of the few interviews that survived the 60s and 70s BBC cultural purge. What were the chances of that?
But Susannah York certainly brightened things up. Although clearly uncomfortable being interviewed, Dee chivvied her along getting her to talk about the films she had recently completed. Interestingly, one of them was The Killing of Sister George with the great Beryl Reid, who would be a guest on DT a few weeks later. During this exchange I couldn’t help but think ‘Will they mention it?’ And lo, they did before quickly moving on after an irate director presumably bawled into Dee’s earpiece (if he had one in those days). ‘It’s about lesbians‘ says Dee casually, ‘But we can’t can’t talk about that on this show.’ I wonder how many of the great viewing public knew what a lesbian was in 1967? And was that the first time the word ‘lesbian’ was used on tea-time telly? I was quite impressed that Dee even mentioned the word in a fairly matter-of-fact way without trying to make a joke about it. For the sixties this was extremely unusual. Gay people were mercilessly lampooned in comedy shows but lesbians were, to my knowledge, never referred to. It did demonstrate Dee’s devil-may-care attitude to celebrity interviews and the show was always likely to throw up little morsels of interest like this but sadly we’ll never know of any other similarly awkward moments, but there would certainly have been plenty, if only we could still see them.
Next up was well-known British character actor Lionel Jeffries who had just completed filming ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘ and he caused uproar and a certain amount of embarrassment when he revealed the clip they had just shown from the film did not feature him in a sentry box, as Dee had said, but as he described it, ‘a bog, a lav.’ Arguably, this was more controversial than mentioning lesbians. The audience collapsed in uncontrolled paroxysms of unbridled hilarity. They’d have been nudging each other conspiratorially in the audience giggling, ‘He said ‘bog!’ They may not have known what a lesbian was but they certainly knew what a ‘lav’ was. And it didn’t come much more risque than to make a reference to a toilet in the Great Britain of 1968.
Some of the shows’ lineups were wonderfully weird in a very sixties unsophisticated way. From the great to the good to the definitely not so good to the pure rubbish. They all happily accepted an invitation to be lightly sautéed by Simon Dee. I always think about what it must have been like in The Green Room prior to broadcasting, and the show was, of course, recorded live so all guests would have been sipping Campari and munching on Ritz crackers. Some of the musical acts may even have been puffing on a ‘reefer’ while engaging in polite conversation with the likes of upper crust fossil the Duke of Bedford or Genxculture favourite Anita Harris.
The first ever episode on 4 April 1967 was a superb indicator as to what this show was all about and where it was going to go during the next two and half years. An uneasy combination of MOR, cutting edge rock and 60s anodyne run-of-the-mill chat.
Kiki Dee: Never a household name during her long and continuing career, in fact she wasn’t even going to have a top 20 hit record for another 6 years when she got to number 13 with Amoureuse. But she was a reliable musical guest with an ever-so-slight ‘alternative’ edge on many variety shows and not quite in the easy listening ubiquity league as Clodagh Rodgers, Vince Hill or Anita Harris. It’s unknown whether Kiki was a chatting to Simon or just singing but probably just singing.
Lance Percival: One of those guys who turned up everywhere during the 60s and early 70s. Everyone knew him but ask anyone ‘What did Lance Percival do?‘ and they would struggle to come up with anything more specific than he was some sort of comedian. In fact, when any show, (comedy, chat, sitcom, variety, satire, quiz) wanted someone vaguely amusing to appear he would be near the top of the list. For someone with limited talents he was never off the telly or the cinema screen for 20 years. He made his name performing topical calypsos on That Was The Week That Was (something he probably wouldn’t get away with today) and his career pretty much took off on an ever so slight upward trajectory after that. Tall, angular and gangly he looked a bit odd and this added to his comedy cache. To give a rough idea of the pies he had bony fingers in, he appeared in programmes and films as diverse as the Carry Ons (inevitable), the shockingly unfunny ‘Confessions’ films, two series of his own show, more interestingly voicing a character in Yellow Submarine, guest supporter on Quizball, celebrity guest on Bullseye, compere of a rubbish 60s celebrity panel game He Said, She Said and appearing on a raft of undemanding chat shows as a mildly witty guest. In fact, he appeared on Dee Time on four separate occasions.
Mike Newman: Who? I know, I had to look him up but he was an Irish comedian and he appeared on no less than six occasions, that is six occasions, on the first series alone of Dee Time in 1967. Clearly someone on the production team liked him and he was obviously available. But it must have been a punishing routine for the poor guy if he was performing his act on each of those shows and having to come up with a new routine every time.
Libby Morris: a Canadian comedian who didn’t seem to be doing much of particular note professionally at the time of this appearance in April 1967. That said, she was a well known and reliable face, like Lance Percival, of the time. To her credit she had appeared a number of times on both The Johnny Carson Show and The Merv Griffin Show in the US. The most interesting parts of her CV , for me at least, were having voiced some characters between 1963-68 on Gerry Anderson’s early puppet series Space Patrol and appearing as the mother in Alexander The Greatest with the wonderful Adrienne Posta in 1971 (See Adrienne Posta: The ’70s ‘It’ Girl below). But she did the rounds of The Golden Shot (See Like A Bolt From The Blue..The Golden Shot, David Nixon’s Magic Box, The Good Old Days, Call My Bluff, Celebrity Squares and Blankety Blank over a thirty year period. Respect! She appeared on DT once more during the three year run.
And this is where it gets really interesting……
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: With musical guests like this Dee Time was certainly hammering its alternative credentials into the ground here. After the blandness of the opening chat line-up this was a programme desperately trying to cement its ‘happening’ musical sixties credentials. This was Hendrix’s first early evening appearance on British TV and he would make a return to Dee Time the following year. He would go on to appear on It Must Be Dusty also the following year and famously on Happening For Lulu in 1969, where the band balked at having to do a duet with Lulu and stopped their performance of Hey Joe half way through to launch into a tribute to the recently disbanded Cream, Sunshine Of Your Love. This led to them being, allegedly, banned from the BBC for life. Unusually for the Beeb, this footage still exists.
Cat Stevens: It’s unknown as to what Cat Stevens actually sang on this first edition, most probably ‘I’m Gonna Get Me A Gun‘ which was riding high in the hit parade at the time, but his appearance alone, along with Hendrix, inspired radio sociologist Laurie Taylor to suggest this programme was the, ‘…forty minutes that could arguably be thought of as the moment the Sixties finally arrived onto …British television.’ Stevens would appear twice more on Dee Time and would also appear on Dee’s short-lived vehicle on ITV in 1970
Other weird lineups included….
11 May 1967: with the great Beryl Reid (wonder if he mentioned lesbians again?) and musical guests The Move, then seen as the wild men of rock, jazzy/ bluesy group The Peddlars (who would appear a number of times on DT) and, bizarrely, Donald Peers. This juxtaposition of The Move and Peers made shows such as this so fascinating. The now virtually forgotten Donald ‘The Laughing Cavalier Of Song’ Peers was a 50s crooner of some note whose signature tune was ‘By A Shady Nook By A Babbling Brook.’ Clearly this was the producers of DT throwing the older generation a few crumbs to try and maintain their interest. It was a ploy that continued throughout DT’s run but it was flogging a very dead horse as DT was all about the Sixties and everyone knew it. That said, Donald Peers appeared quite a few times over the next few years. One could just imagine oldies watching at home pointing to the black and white grainy screen and saying, ‘Now that’s a proper singer!‘
20 June 1967: This was an edition I actually remember. Or at least some of it. Heading the bill was 60s musical sensation Lionel Bart. Well known for his West End Theatre smashes Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be and Oliver!, Bart performed one of his own songs on DT. What I remember vividly, and this was very Sixties, he sat on the darkened set singing and each time he completed a verse he’s take a long drag on the cigarette he was holding and slowly exhale the smoke in time to the music. This disgusted my non-smoking parents who commented on how revolting this looked. I can’t remember whether Bart indulged in some unthreatening banter with Dee, but also on the bill was Warren Mitchell, riding high with ‘Till Death Us Do Part which had begun its long run the previous year, safe pair of chat show hands Leslie ‘Ding Dong’ Phillips and second musical act, up-and-coming American crooner Neil Diamond, who was yet to have a UK top twenty hit. Making up the numbers was rock- a- boogie duo with the rubbish name, The Young Idea, who were in the charts with a version of The Beatles‘ ‘With A Little Help From My Friends. They wouldn’t bother the charts again.
2 March 1968: This edition is also worth noting due to the wide and completely random nature of the guest line-up! This was a fusion of the new, the old, the curious, the sophisticated and the downright bizarre. In a way, a perfect Dee Time storm. The old was represented by former radio quiz inquisitor, occasional actor, including the role of the dad in the original film version of Billy Liar, and soon-to-be sitcom star in ‘For The Love Of Ada’ Wilfred Pickles. For a slightly younger but still fairly mature audience we had Frankie Vaughan. His best days were a long way behind him but he appealed to the parents of 60s pop kids. And talking of pop kids another musical act featured in this edition was perennial popsters Dave Dee (no relation), Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch performing their current chart hit and their only Number One, The Legend Of Xanadu. A left field choice next was Esther and Abi Ofarim with their gibberish hit, also a Number One, Cinderella Rockafella. They divorced soon after and Esther Ofarim was, surprisingly, given her own BBC 2 variety show special, Meet Esther Ofarim. It would a fleeting liaison. And finally, now-disgraced Liberal MP, stalwart of Radio 4’s Just A Minute and TV chef Clement Freud who was always a lugubrious but witty chat show guest. Phew! Poor old Si must have been knackered after all that.
And talking of allegedly disgraced former Liberal MPs, Jeremy Thorpe appeared on the 10 February 1969 and the interview was reviewed very favourably by the ‘clever-clogs’ newspapers (as Alan Partridge might describe them) due to Dee’s questioning on Parliamentary reform and televising the Commons. But, truth be told, this wasn’t what the punters tuned in to see of a Saturday evening. And having politicians as guests was a rarity. Towards the end of his BBC tenure in 1968, however, Dee Time hosted a number of members of the aristocracy on a couple of his shows. Why this was has been lost in the mists of time but one can imagine Dee wanting to show that they were ‘just like you and me‘ and doing a bit of brown-nosing while he was at it. And talking of the mighty Partridge, it reminded me of an episode of his radio chat show ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You‘ in 1992 when one of his guests was the Duchess of Stranraer and he spent the entire interview trying to wangle a weekend invite to her country pile.
Often the chatting guests may have been on the bland side and some completely forgotten (Susannah Young? Ross Hannman? Arthur Murphy?) but many of the musical guests were, not to put too fine a point on it, mind-blowing! Anyone who was anyone from ‘the pop scene’ appeared on Dee Time and one does wonder what a 60s older tea-time audience would have made of some of the more wonderfully psychedelic acts such Traffic, The Turtles, The Move, Procul Harum, The Kinks, The Herd (with a young Peter Frampton), The Troggs or even Cat Stevens! DT did, of course, feature many slightly more house- trained performers such as The Dave Clark Five, The Hollies, The Bee Gees and that most British of bands, The Tremeloes (4 times!). Solo acts, more in keeping with the older part of the audience’s taste, included Genxculture favourites Clodagh Rodgers and Anita Harris, the wonderful Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw not to mention the amazing Nina Simone. Blander fare included the singer with the most un- ‘with-it’ of names, the virtually forgotten Malcolm Roberts, Julie Rodgers (who made a career out of one hit), the inevitable Vince Hill (who made a career out of no hits), Cilla Black popped in a couple of times to screech her latest single as well as Jackie ‘Mrs Tony Hatch’ Trent and Lena Martell (who I once met and she was lovely). And let’s not forget those twin colossi of 60s pop, Pinky and Perky (as they said at the time, ‘£100 a week and they live like pigs!‘). Suffice to say, Dee Time was a treasure trove of the musical great and the good (and the not so good), which makes it even more galling to think the vast majority of these performances have been lost forever.
For every legendary act that appeared on DT there were almost as many who disappeared without trace. Simon Dee was a great believer in featuring acts who he thought deserved some exposure, which showed he maybe wasn’t the pop expert that Radio Two DJ Steve Wright is (OK, that’s a joke). For example, The Warm Sound, The Frugal Sound, The Dollies, The Gentle Power Of Song, The Tinkers, The Bats and The Nocturnes maybe didn’t make the splash they hoped to make after an appearance on Dee Time. Each one of those now utterly forgotten acts probably deserve some sort of analysis as they will all have their own story to tell, and I have no doubt a few will be of interest, but, sadly, that’s for another time on Genxculture. There is still too much to explore in the fascinating Simon Dee story…..
For one thing, it’s a little known fact that the warm-up act for much of Dee Time’s BBC run ws a certain Larry Grayson who reportedly went down a storm with the audience. Now, during the 70s and 80s I have to admit I was never a fan of Grayson. I didn’t think he could hold a candle to Bruce Forsyth as compere of The Generation Game. However. Having watched his act on a mid-70s edition of that surreal variety masterpiece Sunday Night At The London Palladium ( See Tarbuck Memories: Sunday Night at the London Palladium) brought to us by those wonderful people at Talking Pictures TV, I’ve really changed my opinion of him. He was really quite superb. His timing was second to none and I very much stand corrected on that one. Everard will be pleased….. But back to Simon Dee.
His fame and ubiquity wasn’t limited to the small screen, either. At the height of his fame he appeared in the classic 60s film The Italian Job at the behest of one of his showbiz pals, Michael Caine. In Dee’s own very 60s words, ‘I played a poofy Savile Row tailor and I was so good that the poofs started chasing me.’ He also claimed to have been propositioned by Brian Epstein when invited round to his Belgravia house to discuss a project that never happened. Was there anything Simon Dee didn’t do in the 60s? If you believe him the answer is no.
Dee was receiving £250 a show when he was broadcasting twice a week from Manchester up until September 16 1967. This equated to nearly £4000 a show today. As he was appearing twice weekly that was nearly £8000 a week which was pretty decent in anyone’s language. Due to the popularity of the show it was eventually given the hugely prestigious Saturday tea-time slot and despite this massive promotion, the BBC continued to pay him £250 a show, so the number of shows a run was halved and so was his salary. One can see Dee’s point that he was effectively being given a pay cut. And this is where his problems really began. Fallouts with his producer and Head of Light Entertainment at the BBC, Bill Cotton, led to Dee being accused of having a huge destructive ego and unreasonable wage demands. So much so at one point, when Dee became extremely unhappy about losing his opening Johnny Carson-esque monologue due to the producers believing it wasn’t working, he went AWOL and this worried his producers so much that they had Tony Blackburn standing-by to do that night’s Dee Time incase of a no-show by Dee. He did show up in time to do the show but with his lawyers, who Cotton had to deal with. Cotton won out in the end, not surprisingly, but it was the beginning of the end for Dee at the BBC.
The question of his salary, of course, came up again shortly after and many people who worked with him reportedly began to complain of his ego growing and getting in the way, although just as many seem to disagree with this notion. Again, the popularity of Dee Time and his perceived importance to the show inevitably led to him becoming a little to full of his own importance but this tends to happen any most personality driven TV vehicles and I wouldn’t really blame him for this. But in swinging London he was everywhere, at every premiere, fashion show, up market night club, driving around in his Bond Aston Martin DB5 bought from Bond villain Robert Shaw and he was even dating Bond girl Joanne Lumley, amongst others! It’s undocumented what his wife thought about this. According to Dee he even was considered for the part of Bond himself after Sean Connery jumped ship. Although unsuccessful in his audition, Dee’s contention that it was because he was thought to be ‘too tall’ for the part seems a little unlikely given Connery was six feet two.
Something had to give. And, of course , it did, the story of his demise almost writing itself.
The BBC top brass became thoroughly pissed off with Simon Dee and his final request for a pay rise fell on, not only deaf ears, but a growing desire to cut him loose. They began the disengagement process by moving his show to a Monday evening and rubbing salt into the wound by replacing Dee Time with Happening for Lulu, a lot like Dee Time but with Lulu, and the writing was well and truly on the wall for him. His demise at the BBC was the worst kept secret on Fleet Street and when ITV came calling, waving a bulging cheque book, they were only too happy to let him go and Simon couldn’t believe his luck when they offered him an eye-watering £1,000 a show and a two year contract. Too good to be true? You know where this is going….
ITV also happened to have David Frost in its ranks, a more serious, tougher interviewer and he was reportedly unhappy that the network had brought in another chat show personality, albeit a more lightweight one. Bizarrely, they scheduled Dee’s new show straight after Frost’s show late on a Sunday night at a time when most of the viewing public went to bed earlier. Dee was convinced Frost was trying to sabotage his show and there may have been something in that. Mind you, Dee was also convinced he was being monitored by MI5 and CIA and there may have been something in that also. His new show was a ratings flop and the straw that broke the camel’s back was an interview with the new Bond (funny how Bond keeps cropping up in the Dee story) George Lazenby who was high as kite and expounded his weird theories as well as naming names on the assassination of JFK, which was only eight years previously. dee was dragged over the coals at ITV for allowing Lazenby to waffle on about such rubbish and this was the beginning of the end for the show. It’s believed also on the show that night was John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Quite a coup even in those days although John Lennon‘s stock had fallen hugely with the break-up of The Beatles and his taking up with Yoko. She was blamed for the break-up of The Beatles and, therefore, the media and much of the Great British Public hated Yoko with a vengeance. She was vilified in a way that was not only racist but also misogynist, a situation that still exists, but to a slightly lesser extent, today. Due to the Lazenby interview, however, their participation is virtually forgotten and, of course, no known record of the show still exists.
Another sign that Dee’s reputation wasn’t quite what it was involved, weirdly, the England 1970 World Cup Squad. They had been booked to appear on the Sunday night show to debut their shouty new single, Back Home, even before it had been featured on Top Of The Pops. This would have been a huge triumph for Dee not to say a massive and badly needed ratings boost. But boring old Alf Ramsey vetoed the appearance at the last minute as it would mean keeping the boys up too late. Despite the show being recorded at tea time on the same Sunday as the broadcast went out. It’s unlikely this would have happened if Dee had still been on the BBC.
To be fair, the guest list for this run of the show was less than impressive. Although details are sketchy and few documents relating to the show have been kept, as well as the disastrous Lazenby interview, American comedienne Carol Channing, reportedly a very difficult interviewee, cheery cockney songster Joe Brown, stalwart British character actor Patrick Cargill, and Dee favourite Robert Morley all appeared but hardly set the pulses racing. Other guests of some note included Ned Sherrin, Samuel Becket muse Billie Whitelaw, Laurence Harvey (who’s girlfriend Dee allegedly had a dalliance with, although whether Harvey was bothered is unknown), Terry Thomas and 70s TV sex-bomb Peter Wyngarde. One of the few shows show of any real interest involved the always good value Vincent Price, who apparently poached a piece of haddock in a dishwasher on the show, and, oddly, paranormal author and extreme Right-winger Dennis Wheatley, which may have been worth staying up for but few did. And, to be honest, it was thin gruel. The show did go out with a bang though. Reports vary as to who appeared on the very last Simon Dee Show but some believe that on 21st June 1970 the recently sadly departed Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Bruce Forsyth and Harry Secombe (can’t win them all!) made up the very last edition. Other reports believe it was the Archbishop of Canterbury doing a solo gig which wasn’t so good, but we’ll probably never know as no recordings of those shows seemingly exist.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for Dee inadvertently involved, bizarrely, unthreatening MOR crooner Matt Monro. Dee had wanted him to provide the musical entertainment in one of his shows but the producers didn’t, for some reason. Dee took a strop similar to the one he took at the BBC and went AWOL again. The producers had reliable 50s DJ Pete Murray on standby in the same way the BBC had Tony Blackburn waiting in the wings the previous year. Dee did turn up in time to do the show but the big-wigs at ITV had had enough and cancelled the show. Although their story was that The Simon Dee Show was never cancelled, Dee’s contract was just never renewed. A bit like the way The Monkees ended. They didn’t split up, they just didn’t have their contracts renewed.
And that was pretty much that for Simon Dee. It has to be remembered that with only three channels and two networks there was nowhere for him to go having burned his boats at both the BBC and ITV. Today he’d have ended up on Channel 5 or Channel 4 or even the darker regions of cable TV such as Dave but in a strange sort of way it was this severely limited media structure that made him so big but also destined him to obscurity. His life sped out of control and went downhill very quickly and included a couple of short jail terms for petty offences which the tabloids made the most of.
In fact, Channel 4 brought him back for a one-off Dee Time in 2003 and one critic wrote that Dee reminded him of
Alan Partridge- a toxic mix of naff, bitterness, strange vulnerability and pompous self-regard.
The talentless Elizabeth Hurley, whose acting career took a similar trajectory to Dee’s when it was discovered she couldn’t act, said he was the personality Austin Powers was based on. I’m not so sure though, and anyway, how would she know?.
Was it his massive ego that resulted in such a humiliating fall? No, it really wasn’t. He was just a victim of his times. Maybe a touch of humility would have made a difference but humility didn’t really go with the territory.
His life went from 60s superhero to ultimate zero but, you have to say, it was quite a ride.
