Dale Winton: Game show host who became a daytime TV legend with ‘Supermarket Sweep’

Dale Winton was the flamboyant and much-loved television presenter, best known for hosting ITV game show Supermarket Sweep in the 1990s, appearing in seven series, and more recently in the BBC lottery show In It To Win It.

Winton, who has died aged 62, delighted audiences with his broad smile and infectious sense of humour, edged with more than a touch of camp.

The TV personality was born in Marylebone, London, in 1955 to Gary Winner, a furniture salesman, and the actress Sheree Winton.

His parents divorced when he was 10 years old. Winner died three years later, on the day of his son’s bar mitzvah. His mother chose to end her own life, taking an overdose of barbiturates, when her son was 21.

Winton left school at 16 and began his entertainment career in 1972, spinning discs at pubs and clubs in Richmond. Beginning as DJ’s assistant to Steve Allen, who would later become a presenter on LBC, he was soon in demand running his own gigs. Allen later recalled, with fond gratitude, “If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t think I’d be doing radio.”

A decade later Winton moved to London and DJ’d on the nightclub circuit, leading to a slot presenting on local radio. His break into televison came in 1986 with Pet Watch on BBC1, following the lives of pets and their owners, a format which Winton later described as “one of the BBC’s surreal attempts at programming”.

Supermarket Sweep was the popular ITV game show whose aim was to “shop smarter and faster than the next person” and search for £2,000 in cash, stashed somewhere in the store. After topping up their clocks by responding to quiz questions, contestants would dash around the supermarket, filling their trollies with goods.

The programme, which ran from 1993 to 2001, gave a much-needed boost to his career, as Winton recalled in a later interview: “I’ll always feel passionate about Supermarket Sweep because if it wasn’t for that show I wouldn’t have done anything I’ve done since!”

Justine Picardie, interviewing him in 1995 for The Independent newspaper, noted: “He was a fat child, and at an early age was sent away to boarding school. He was expected to become a lawyer or an accountant (his father was in business, owning three furniture shops)’.” But he was inspired by his glamorous mother, he said.

Winton subsequently presented In It To Win It, the BBC’s lottery show, from 2002 to 2016 and hosted the first series of Hole in the Wall (2008). In a notable cameo role for Danny Boyle’s black comedy Trainspotting (1996), Winton is seen as himself on television, asking protagonist Mark Renton’s parents quiz questions about HIV.

In his 2002 autobiography, Dale: My Story, he decided to come out, choosing the last chapter to reveal his sexuality and his one-time dilemma of being torn between a man and a woman: “And when I first fell in love at about eighteen, being me, I fell in love with one of each at the same time – a girl called Caroline, and a guy called John.”

He went on to write candidly that, “Although this was the very beginning of the Seventies, when attitudes to relationships were far less liberal than they are now, I never felt under any pressure to compromise how I felt and I didn’t feel at all guilty about how I was expressing my feelings.”

In June 2016 on ITV’s Loose Women he opened up to the panel and audience about coming to terms with depression. “I should have taken myself off the TV but I didn’t”, he said at the time, “Listen, there are worse things in the world – but I had depression and I didn’t realise.”

Winton continued: “I always thought, ‘get over yourself’. But my mum died of it. It exists and anybody out there who has had it knows it exists. I didn’t want to put one foot in front of the other but for a couple of really good friends.”

The previous month, somewhat bizarrely, Winton had revealed his support for Donald Trump, who had just announced his intention to run for president.

Writing for The Conservative Woman blog, he called himself “a closet fan of American politics for the past six years” and declared: “As one who spent his entire professional life being ridiculed for my ‘fluorescent tanned’ complexion, I felt compassion for the man before he even uttered a single word ... I was truly offended at times and yet there were moments when he made total sense.”

In February of this year Channel 5 broadcast his series, Dale Winton’s Florida Fly Drive, a four-episode travelogue following his 1,500-mile road trip across the Sunshine State. In a lighthearted nod to his earlier career, a scene shows him behind a trolley in a British supermarket, searching for marmalade and English tea, in preparation for the trip.

However, six days after airing the first episode, the series was halted in the wake of the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14. Channel 5 announced that the remaining three episodes will be aired “at an appropriate time in the future”.

Piers Morgan and Davina McCall led tributes to him. McCall said: “I am so so so sad to hear about Dale Winton. A lovely, warm, kind, sensitive, generous soul with a touch of naughty! RIP.”

“Life is so extraordinary, it should be lived to the full”, Winton once wrote, and he was certainly one who lived life to its fullest.

Dale Winton, television presenter, born 22 May 1955, died 18 April 2018