It’s a never-failing indication of creeping old age when icons of your youth die. I’m old enough to have been enthralled by Simon Dee’s tea-time show on TV. To an adolescent in grimy Moston, he seemed effortlessly cool, roaring off into the sunset in his E-type as the credits rolled at the end of the show. He was one of the first people who were famous for being famous- he had no discernible talent other than handsome features and a pleasantly unforced television manner. He seemed at the time to epitomise the new youth culture, as it took over the bastion of the establishment, the BBC. What happened after his flop at LWT is quite shocking. There were a couple of comeback attempts, but essentially, this man spent half his life on the scrapheap.
Dee Time by Dr Rob Spence is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I am too young to have heard of him first time round, but he's always dragged out as an example of fame going wrong. Always seemed rather sad really.
Very sad. But, as I say, he didn't really have that much to offer, and was probably a victim of the emphasis on youth – he was mid-thirties when his career foundered. It seems he couldn't mature into middle age in public, but was already too old for the yoof-oriented shows for which he was famous.