Robin Leach, host of TV’s ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ dies at 76

Robin Leach, a British-born 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, died Aug. 23 in Las Vegas. He was 76.

His family announced the death in a statement. He had two strokes in the past year.

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 and son of a London vacuum company manager, he understood better than most the success-obsessed middle class and, in his exclamatory catchphrase, their “champagne wishes and caviar dreams!” He offered voyeuristic access to the decadent playgrounds of the 1 percent, from Hollywood to the Riviera, and he packaged it as a veneration of free-market, 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 as a human being.”

“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, beaming garish displays of Croesus-like wealth into millions of living rooms.

In addition to the flagship program, Leach served as commentator on spinoffs including “Runaway With the Rich and Famous” and “Fame, Fortune and Romance.” His distinctive voice was used to move merchandise: He did voice-over narration for TV ads featuring Bud Light pitch dog Spuds MacKenzie, as well as commercials for Honda, the California Lottery and Meineke.