TV personality dies
Television ‘girl next door’ and agony aunt who compèred Eurovision and became the face of Camay
Katie Boyle, the long-time host of the Eurovision Song Contest, has died aged 91. Host of the contest in the Sixties and Seventies, she was an announcer, panellist, agony aunt, actress and newspaper and magazine columnist.
KATIE BOYLE (Lady Saunders), the television personality and agony aunt, who has died aged 91, was the glamorous but sensible “girl next door” best known for her “Dear Katie” problem page in TV Times; she was also remembered for her multilingual compèring of the Eurovision Song Contest – and especially for her oft-repeated phrase “Nul points”.
What was less well known was that she developed her bubbly, levelheaded persona after surviving an eccentric and traumatic upbringing in Italy, during which she was expelled from several schools and spent time in a mental asylum.
She was born Caterina Irena Elena Maria Imperiali de Francavilla on May 29 1926 to a half-italian, half-russian aristocratic father and a half-english, half-australian mother. Her early years were spent in Italy, where she became the object of a “tug-of-love” battle between her divorcing parents.
She remembered being “kidnapped” by her father and “thoroughly enjoying all the excitement” when he, dressed as a Russian and reeking of Arpège, bundled her into the back of his car and covered her with a rug. During his attempts to gain a divorce, he obtained Hungarian nationality for himself and his daughter.
After the divorce they returned to Italy, where Katie was expelled from four schools, once for throwing a plate “piled high with Sunday lunch” at her headmistress, and from another (aged 10) for threatening to murder any girl in her class who did not believe that she was secretly married to Tyrone Power. Finally, her father sent her to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Rome, where she survived until she was 17.
By 1944 her father was showing signs of mental imbalance. After Katie left school he locked her in her room for weeks on end while he terrorised the household with a pistol which he carried with him at all times. She had embarked on an affair with her father’s closest friend, Franco Damone, and escaped from her room to meet Damone (who had left his wife and children); they went into hiding.
Damone was later executed by the communists, and Katie’s father had her committed to the Villa Bertalazone, a mental clinic, where she remained for nine months. She recalled an attempt by the staff to treat her with ECT: “It felt horrible, but what could I do? I felt the strap tighten around my ankles. I was being electrocuted, but did it really matter? It was just that I didn’t like the idea of scrambled brains.”
The elderly owners of the sanatorium finally smuggled her out, and she approached the senior American officer at the Allied Headquarters, pleading for help “amid floods of tears”.
Several weeks later she was retrieved by her mother, and in 1946 they moved to Britain, where the following year – after attending “rounds of ladies’ luncheons at Claridge’s” – Katie married Viscount (Richard) Boyle, whom she described as “a man of ponderous calm”.
She admitted to being “stage struck”, and in 1947 she visited Elstree Studios, where she was offered the role of the “nauseating schoolgirl” in the film Old Mother Riley, starring Arthur Lucan and Kitty Mcshane. Fearing that her title would hamper her acting career, she adopted the name Catherine Carleton.
Determined to forge a career on stage, she went to see John Counsell, then in the process of staging Dick
Whittington in Windsor. When he asked her: “Do you sing?”, she replied: “I haven’t actually been trained, but my mother has a nice voice and so has my father, so I try to sing.” When asked if she acted, she said: “Don’t we girls always act?” She secured a job as a chorus girl at five guineas a week.
During the late Forties and early Fifties, when many cosmetic companies were enlisting titled women to promote their products, Katie Boyle was asked to endorse Pond’s Cold Cream. She also modelled blouses and hats, and worked as a mannequin for the Jean Bell agency in Chelsea.
By 1950, however, her marriage was failing: “I had to contend with bits of Richard’s car strewn around the room when I wanted to roast our dinner. I used to explode in Italian.” Later that year she was offered the opportunity to go to Australia on a modelling tour.
It lasted three months, and during this time she embarked on a relationship with Greville Baylis, a racehorse owner. The tour over, they spent three weeks together in Ceylon, and on returning to London she left her husband.
Meanwhile, Katie Boyle was starting to develop a career on television. She was asked to host Quite Contrary, a variety show then being produced by Richard Afton. She would later work on game shows, among them What’s My Line?, The Name’s the Same and Juke Box Jury.
Despite her popularity with the viewing public, Katie Boyle was causing concern among her BBC bosses on account of her private life. Greville Baylis’s wife was creating difficulties over his divorce, and public interest became so lively that the Corporation felt it would be better if Katie Boyle stopped working until, as the executive Cecil Mcgivern put it, her private life was “less muddled”.
She received a death threat through the post (the writer claiming to hate her for “being aristocratic and having a supercilious attitude” and threatening to kill her if she did not resign from television).
In 1955 Katie Boyle married Baylis and was accepted back into the BBC fold. She appeared in several of the televised Goon Shows, and once said how surprised she was at having a “nose-in-the-air” reputation, “considering what crazy antics I got up to with the Goons”.
In fact, she had a reputation for cheery ordinariness, which is why she became a doyenne of presentations, quiz shows and award ceremonies. The pinnacle of her achievement in this arena was the Eurovision Song Contest, which she hosted in 1961 and again in 1963, 1968 and 1974.
Katie Boyle also found time to star in a television series called Golden Girl, about a “particularly irritating English miss”. She also appeared in several films, including Intent to Kill, starring Richard Todd. In 1964 she was named European Radio and Television Personality of the Year.
During the 1960s she was asked to endorse the soap brand Camay. When she first insisted on trying the product, she found that she “came out in spots all over”, and Camay changed the formula. She went on to advertise the soap as a beauty aid for several years.
Katie Boyle began to answer readers’ letters on her “Dear Katie” page in TV Times in 1970, and she continued to work as an agony aunt for the next 18 years. After Greville Baylis’s death in an accident in Kenya in 1976, she described herself as “deeply grateful to the many readers of my Dear Katie page who never stopped bringing me their problems when I so desperately needed to escape from my own”.
Katie Boyle now developed an interest in the afterlife. Having consulted a medium, she became convinced of her husband’s survival beyond the grave after being unable to remove his wedding ring from her finger. “I tried to coax the ring off with soap,” she said. “I even tried the old trick of threading a piece of string through it, but it resisted all attempts. I felt Greville had spoken.”
Baylis spoke again three years later when Katie Boyle married her third husband, the impresario Sir Peter Saunders. She recalled: “That afternoon I was playing with my rings, and to my amazement they both slipped off. I knew Greville approved.”
In 1980 Katie Boyle published an autobiography, What This Katie Did.
Other books were Dear Katie (1975), a collection of extracts from her TV
Times column, and Boyle’s Lore (1982). Throughout the Eighties Katie Boyle continued her work in broadcasting, appearing on television in Give Us a
Clue and hosting radio programmes. She gave up her Dear Katie page in 1988, when she moved to Chat magazine to front a column selecting household tips sent in by readers.
She was a staunch supporter of Battersea Dogs’ Home, often joining “dawn patrols” that searched the streets for stray animals.
Her third husband, Sir Peter Saunders, died in 2003.