Charming, perma-tanned presenter of Supermarket Sweep
A well-loved figure on British television for 30 years, Dale Winton, who has died aged 62, was best known for Supermarket Sweep, a daytime game show, launched in 1993, in which contestants were invited to race around the aisles of a fake supermarket, piling their trolleys high with freebies. This was not quality TV; that it became a huge hit in the 1990s, beloved by pensioners as well as students, was largely down to Winton’s enthusiasm and goodnatured, high-camp charm, said The Times. Such was his ubiquity in the 1990s, he was asked to appear as “himself” – a maddeningly upbeat chat-show host in a pink satin suit – in a nightmarish scene in the 1995 film Trainspotting. Being a good sport, he agreed.
Born in London in 1955, Dale Winton was the son of Gary Winner, a furniture salesman, and Sheree Winton, an actress once dubbed “Britain’s Jayne Mansfield”. The family were well off, but it was not a happy home. His father was a bully who died on the morning of his son’s bar mitzvah. Winton adored his mother, but she was plagued by depression. When he was 21, he came home one day to find that she’d taken a fatal overdose. Determined to follow her into showbiz, Winton worked for years as a DJ, then made his TV debut in 1986 in a show called Pet Watch. He lost weight, acquired a perma-tan and had a nose job, and for years was rarely off the screen, presenting shows from Pets Win Prizes to In It to Win It.
But off screen, all was not well. In 2016, he admitted to having gone through a “bad breakup” that left him so depressed he was unable to leave the house. He’d also struggled with a knee condition. He’d put on weight and worried his career was over. “I never wanted to be David Frost or Ludovic Kennedy,” he once said. “I set my heart on becoming a quiz-show host. You can call it shallow. But I was born to do ‘win a fridge television’. Let’s face it, I was made for this and probably very little else.”