My dinner date with Dale – a charismatic, fun guy with issues
IT WAS a long balmy evening in the ubertrendy South Beach area of Miami Beach. As the sun set for the evening, I sat on the terraces of the famous Balans restaurant on Lincoln Boulevard – essentially the Grafton Street of the affluent district.
My wife and I were having dinner with Louis Walsh; it was January 2012 and The X Factor had just finished one of its biggest seasons yet.
We were digesting the end of the series run that gave us James Arthur when Louis dropped a surprise. He said: ‘I have a friend joining us – I promise you won’t be disappointed.’ He kept the identity of the mystery diner a secret, and then down the boulevard came Dale Winton.
I have to admit I didn’t recognise him immediately; he was wearing black sunglasses, a bandanna, a Miami Heat jersey and matching shorts and a giant pair of Nike Air Jordan trainers.
He had his iPod on and you could faintly hear the beats of some innocuous rap music. His car, a black Bentley convertible with pink rims on the wheels, was parked down the street.
The first impression you get is that he is tall, at least 6ft 4in, but that pearly white smile was straight from television.
My impression of ‘TV Dale’ was of a calm, articulate presenter whose trademark insouciance made him one of the top British television earners for over a decade on Supermarket Sweep and the BBC Lottery Game.
But this Dale was different. He was camp as you like, with a quick wit and a sharp tongue. He was a wonderful dinner-time company and regaled us for two hours with stories about some of the bestknown people in showbiz, while we sat with our jaws open.
I wish I could retell some of his wonderful stories about famous people but my lawyer would lose his life. He was irreverent but warm and funny, and he had this soft side which was completely at odds with his absolute love of rap music and the American Republican Party. His love of the Bush family was the subject of both a serious discussion and of a really bad joke, again unprintable.
He seemed really happy living in Florida, but always I got the distinct impression that he missed working on prime-time TV.
He always spoke about the next gig (he said he was always getting offered lucrative ads) and the plans that might take him back to the BBC.
Although he had filmed several pilots in recent times, he refused to do reality shows as he didn’t want to ‘cheapen my brand’.
He clearly loved being on TV and spoke at length about his time on Supermarket Sweep. He was surprised and delighted that we had watched it incessantly in Ireland.
However, I also got the impression that he was a man with a lot going on in his personal life, someone who constantly used humour as a method of deflection.
While there was talk of luxury cruises around the Bahamas with his good pals Cilla Black and Cliff Richard, he spoke about having a chronic problem sleeping in his palatial home in the Sunshine State. He insisted on having televisions in every room in the house and could only sleep with both the TV and his iPod on at the same time. ‘I need the constant noise to sleep,’ he explained.
Honest to a fault, he was nonetheless a gregarious and fun person to be around.
He had charisma by the bucketload and to say he was unforgettable was an understatement. Dale was a bon viveur and espoused all the values of the old showbiz era – when stars had to have talent to be on television.