Obituary - Dale Winton, TV presenter

Died: April 18 2018

DALE Winton, who has died aged 62, was best known as the presenter of television game shows that achieved devoted followings, largely as a result of his personality.

That appeared the reasonable judgment, at any rate, because the formats of the programmes ranged from the inane to the ludicrous, while Winton seemed born for the role of TV host. Solicitous, kindly and camp, he managed simultaneously to suggest that the proceedings were of enormous importance and as silly as they actually were, and masked his own professional competence with deprecating protestations of amateurism.

Winton first came to widespread attention as the host of Supermarket Sweep, an ITV daytime show, based on an American format, in which contestants answered questions (such as judging the number of calories in various groceries), solved riddles and attempted to remember lists of items.

If they were successful, they notched up time for the show’s highlight, in which they dashed around a mock-up of a supermarket (constructed at Central TV’s Nottingham studios, also home to Blockbusters) throwing items into their shopping trolleys. The team with the largest-value haul at the checkout won.

Winton brought some semblance of normal human interaction to this naked celebration of consumerism, giving every impression of a real interest in the contestants, while sending up his own role, and encouraging them not to “knock over the cameraman” as they hurtled around the set.

The programme, like Blockbusters and Going for Gold before it, acquired a cult following, particularly from students, and its initial run totted up some 500 episodes from its debut in 1993 until it finished in September 2001. Winton’s contribution to its success was recognised when it was renamed Dale’s Supermarket Sweep. It enjoyed a brief revival in 2007.

Winton’s popularity as a host eventually brought him a prime-time presenting slot with the BBC’s lottery show, In It To Win It, which kicked off the channel’s Saturday night schedule. Since the main interest of most viewers was the result of the lottery draw (slotted in live, at first drawn by Winton, and later by celebrities from “Lottery HQ”), the format – which involved contestants moving from the “waiting area” to the “winners’ zone” if they got the general knowledge questions right – hardly mattered. But Winton was an amiable enough presence, frequently sending up his enthusiasm for fake tanning salons, his camp mannerisms, fluctuating weight and low-brow tastes, and exuding what seemed genuine concern for contestants.

Other shows had more preposterous premises. Pets Win Prizes (which he took over from Danny Baker in 1995) involved animal obstacle courses and general knowledge questions, with the winners’ prizes dependent on a cat called The Professor. Channel 4’s Touch the Truck, which ran over four nights in March 2001, simply asked contestants to keep hold of a lorry for as long as they could.

In 2003, he appeared on BBC Three’s Dale’s Wedding, a “mockumentary” in which he was supposed to marry the glamour model Nell McAndrew. This bizarre exercise was the odder since Winton had, the previous year, finally announced (to no one’s surprise) that he was gay.

The best of the lot was Hole in the Wall (2008) based, like many truly absurd game shows, on a Japanese original. In it, celebrity contestants clad in lycra stood on the edge of a pool filled with water. When Dale cried “Bring on the wall!”, a slowly moving wall with an oddly cut hole would move towards them. If they failed to contort themselves into the appropriate shape, they would be knocked into the water. But though the show was popular enough, Winton was replaced as host after the first series by the ballroom dancer Anton du Beke.

Dale Jonathan Winton was born on May 22 1955 at Marylebone in central London, the son of Gary Winton (originally Winner) and Sheree (née Shirley Patrick). Winton père was a furniture salesman, and Sheree Winton was a moderately successful actress sometimes described as “the English Jayne Mansfield”. She converted to Judaism to marry Dale’s father in 1957, but they divorced in 1965.

Dale grew up in north London, and his childhood was marred by the sudden death of his father in 1968, on the morning of his son’s bar mitzvah. Their relationship had been strained, and Winton recalled in his autobiography, My Story (2002), that he attended the funeral in a red sports car and felt no particular remorse.

By contrast, he was devoted to his mother. But she suffered from periodic fits of serious depression and in 1976 she committed suicide with an overdose of painkillers, leaving a “Do Not Disturb” sign on her bedroom door. Her son discovered the body. Winton later suffered from physical ill-health, as his father had, and talked frankly about his own difficulties with depression similar to his mother’s. Two years ago, in an interview with ITV’s Loose Women, he said that he had had a spell of almost five years in which he found it almost impossible to leave his house.

“I should have taken myself off the TV, but I didn’t,” he said. “Listen, there are worse things in the world, but I had depression and I didn’t realise… but my mum died of it. It exists, and anyone out there who has had it knows it exists.”

He had already begun working as a touring disc jockey, playing at clubs and bars around west London in the early 1970s, basing himself near Richmond. On the circuit he met Steve Allen, later a presenter on the radio station LBC, who remained one of his closest friends. After his mother’s death, he inherited a substantial sum of money, but managed to get through it in just three years on what he described as an “enormous spending spree”.

He took a number of jobs, including selling timeshare apartments, but was gradually building up a reputation as a DJ and radio presenter. He got a job with the United Biscuits Radio Network, progressing to the morning show, and then commuted between London and the Midlands, with a slot on Nottingham’s Radio Trent (where he again ended up hosting the morning programme), and then stints with Radio Chiltern, Radio Danube and three years at Wolverhampton’s Beacon Radio.

Throughout the 1980s, Winton had struggled with his weight. But after his first appearances on television (on BBC Bristol’s Pet Watch), he made a determined effort to diet, had a nose job, and began to wear suits and ties. Intermittent gigs followed on Channel 4, with the Lifestyle Channel and on minor ITV daytime shows, until he landed the presenter’s role on Supermarket Sweep in 1993.

The omens were not at first auspicious. Winton complained that the producers wanted him to behave “as if it were Mastermind or something”. But when he was at last allowed to be himself and his likeability and good nature came through, the ratings rocketed.

A couple of years later, he took a cameo in Danny Boyle’s film of Trainspotting, as an oleaginous game show host tormenting Ewan McGregor’s character during his hallucinations while going cold turkey. He made appearances on shows like Top of the Pops and the long-running radio quiz Just a Minute, and popped up (often as himself) in Absolutely Fabulous, Come Fly With Me, three series of ITV’s Celebrity Fit Club and TV advertisements for cashmygold.com.

For a decade, from 2000, he presented the BBC 2 radio programme Pick of the Pops, taking over from Alan Freeman. He also regularly deputised when the station’s other presenters were on holiday.

In recent years, he had suffered from ill health, with surgery on his knees and back, and there was sometimes speculation about his well-being, especially in 2015, after the death of his close friend Cilla Black, when he was photographed looking gaunt and sporting a peculiar Mohican haircut.

Winton did not enjoy discussing his private life, though he maintained that he had never made any particular effort to disguise his homosexuality. Indeed, he claimed that he had been rather surprised that no one ever asked him about it in interviews, and then came to quite enjoy the ambiguity of his camp persona. In later interviews, he was frank about the difficulty of maintaining a relationship with a public profile, and said that he had been through a bad break-up which had left him feeling down.

Little of this affected his on-screen roles, in which he seemed always cheerful, warm and engaging. His later television projects included Dale’s Great Getaway (2012) and earlier this year, for Channel 5, Dale’s Florida Fly Drive. His agent announced that he had died at home on April 18.

ANDREW MCKIE