Gossip writer paved voyeuristic path for celebrity-drenched lifestyle television

‘‘I would love to do a show called Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown. But nobody would watch it.’’

Robin Leach, who has died aged 76, was a British-born American TV personality and unapologetic practitioner of ‘‘jacuzzi journalism’’ whose long-running show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous ogled the world’s most conspicuous consumers consuming conspicuously.

With his thinning hair, paunch, elfin grin and tendency to speak in a quasi-Cockney tongue at carnival-barker volume, Leach was few people’s idea of an urbane sophisticate or a blow-dried television host. He called himself ‘‘the most unlikely star in the world’’.

Yet as a veteran gossip writer, he understood better than most the successobsessed middle class and, in his exclamatory catchphrase, their ‘‘champagne wishes and caviar dreams’’. He offered voyeuristic access to the playgrounds of the 1 per cent, from Hollywood to the Riviera, and packaged it as a veneration of up-by-your-bootstraps capitalism.

‘‘What Robin Leach presented is an incredibly seductive batch of cultural catnip,’’ said television and pop-culture scholar Robert Thompson. ‘‘However much you may think it’s terrible to feature people with way more than their share of the resources of the Earth, it is really fun to watch how incredibly luxuriously it is possible to live . . .’’

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous began its 11-year run in syndication in 1984. It was picked up by more than 200 stations, and such was its penetration that, in some markets, it was broadcast seven days a week, often multiple times a day.

Leach spent his early career as a tabloid scoop artist and flourished as a cheeky guest on TV entertainment shows. He joined the nascent Entertainment Tonight in 1981 but, after a few years, complained that the focus was too much on actors promoting their latest work and not enough on beautiful people enjoying their trappings.

‘‘We’d go into these houses and we’d talk to these blonde-headed bimbos who’d talk about how they wanted to stretch by doing Shakespeare-in-the-park,’’ he said. ‘‘They were nothing more than jiggle queens and I’d say to myself, ‘I don’t want to see anything more than you taking your clothes off and stepping into the bubble bath.’ From that gem of facetiousness came a TV show.’’

Over 60 minutes – later reduced to 30 – Leach interviewed actors, models, industrialists and anyone else with a net worth above $50 million (the minimum cutoff). He delivered bromides in breathless tones, promising viewers ‘‘another journey with the most envied people in the world’’ and admission to ‘‘the homes of the world’s elite

. . . where winning at the top is the ultimate victory’’. He repeated ‘‘glamorous,’’ ‘‘exclusive’’ and ‘‘success’’ loudly and ad nauseam.

‘‘I believe in talking in 96-point,’’ he told the New York Times, referring to the font size of banner tabloid headlines. ‘‘I love cliches. I love alliteration. On television, you can wrap your tongue around cliches and aggressive verbs.’’

Cameras lingered worshipfully over the rococo and the vulgar. In the $10m home of the Las Vegas animal-act duo Siegfried and Roy, Leach marvelled at their replica of a section of the Sistine Chapel over the bar. One Australian business magnate had a dining room with a wall that opened to reveal a private bullring. Another episode featured a 120ft limousine modified to fit a hot tub and a helicopter landing pad.

The show traded skin-deep access for celebrity brand-building, letting supermodels present themselves as relatable homebodies and showcasing the profanely rich as humble. A segment on Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms merchant and playboy, described him as ‘‘a pure monetary force, the golden artery feeding the world’s biggest deals’’ and ‘‘a surprisingly private family man’’.

Critics feasted on what they regarded as a cultural carcass ripe for picking. ‘‘The onslaught of the superficial is reaching absurd proportions,’’ the New York Times wrote, noting how the success of People magazine had helped spawn imitators in print and on air. But Lifestyles, it concluded, dispatched the competition with its ‘‘almost fanatical preoccupation with money and/or power’’.

Leach was name-checked in rap songs as a byword for showy affluence. He endured so long that two Saturday Night Live comedians – Harry Shearer and later Dana Carvey – satirised him.

Leach said he was not amused – but only because the lampoon didn’t go far enough. It ‘‘could have been rougher and ruder. I mean, if you’re really going to savage me, savage me. I mean it’s a perfect thing to parody, isn’t it? It goes with the territory’’.

‘‘I would love to do a show called Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown,’’ he added. But ‘‘nobody would watch it. Because there is this thing, this innate curiosity that’s born into us, that we want to know about the person who is better than ourselves, not the person who isn’t.’’

Robin Douglas Leach was born in London during World War II. He became one of the youngest reporters on Fleet Street, then moved to New York in 1963 and sold shoes at Lord & Taylor while trying to break into American journalism. He started a short-lived rock’n’roll magazine called Go, spent years as show-business editor at Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid Star, and did freelance gossip and entertainment writing.

In 2014, he remarked that Lifestyles seemed almost quaint and restrained. ‘‘Now you have Kim Kardashian having her private area waxed on camera,’’ he said. ‘‘Disgusting.’’

Survivors include three sons from a marriage that ended in divorce. – Washington Post