I worked with Dale Winton – he was camp and common but he excelled at the art of popular television

This week, Waitrose announced that 100 specially trained experts are going to patrol their supermarkets advising shoppers on healthy eating. These “nutrition nannies” will be wearing specially designed fleeces and aprons and have been given the task of steering shoppers away from chocolate and oven-ready chips and towards fresh fruit and vegetables.

When I first heard this news, I thought Waitrose had pinched a storyline from my favourite soap, Trollied, but no – nutrition nannies are a real piece of modern marketing strategy.

How far we’ve come since those heady days in the Nineties when permatanned smiley Dale Winton hosted Supermarket Sweep on ITV, encouraging contestants to cram their trollies to the brim with everything they could grab. The daytime show was a huge hit, a guilty pleasure for millions. These days, the simple act of shopping has become a battleground, fraught with guilt, a chance to fail at making the right lifestyle choices.

Millennials aren’t comfortable touching meat, apparently, so Sainsbury’s plans to sell chicken bits in pouches to make sure the poor darlings won’t come into physical contact with flesh, and fleece-wearing carb police will be monitoring our baskets for evidence of ready meals and sugar-loaded popcorn. The untimely death of Dale at 62 just adds to the gloom – a game show in which he took on the new nutrition nannies would have made compulsive viewing on any channel.

Dale was a larger-than-life character – physically imposing, exuding enthusiasm and fun. He was not quiet and unassuming: he operated in a bubble of high camp. We met in the early 1990s; I was a BBC executive, ordered to perk up some entertainment shows in Manchester and lumbered with the task of relaunching Bobby Davro (not a comedian I felt any empathy towards). Dale had been a local radio host and presented Anything For Money on Sky, in which he persuaded the public to do silly things.

On Bobby’s show, he did a similar stunt, and the result was brilliant – Dale stole the show. His persona was made for daytime television and early evening entertainment. Very much in the tradition of Larry Grayson, he instantly connected with the public, which is a very rare talent.

Dale became extremely successful, hosting the National Lottery and shouty game shows, all with varying degrees of success – if these projects sometimes failed in the ratings, the fault did not lie with Dale’s input, but with the formats themselves. Of course, snooty critics slagged off much of Dale’s work as crass and common (the same people who are now “evaluating” his contribution to popular culture, no doubt), but “common” is a description which applies to most television viewers.

To achieve high ratings is the holy grail of mainstream television programme makers, not to come up with a series like Civilisation, watched by a few and made by people who live in Hampstead talking to luvvies who live in posh bits of west London. Dale spoke directly to viewers who live in council flats and semi-detached houses, ie the majority of the population.

Class very much still rules when popular television is discussed in the media. I mistakenly thought I had to aspire to the middle-class intelligentsia when I clawed my way up through the pyramid of power at the BBC (without a degree) in the Nineties. It was only after appearing on I’m a Celebrity... in 2004 that I fully understood the power and the downsides of high ratings.

As a presenter or performer, you are completely disposable, and will be replaced by executives without a second thought if they think a different face might get another ratings point. In the eyes of the public, you are their friend, someone who has lived in their house for years through a screen: someone they feel is almost like a member of the family.

The relentless downgrading of juicy work is what happened to Dale over the years; television is a heartless business. Presenters go from a prime channel like BBC1 or ITV to appearing on Channel 5 or a niche digital channel, where the fees are smaller and the audiences miniscule.

David Walliams (a good friend of Dale’s) said this week, “You have your moment in the sun, you’re still working, but you’re not quite where you were.” Budget cuts and lack of advertising revenue mean that repeats dominate the airwaves, and so Dale Winton was still appearing in our living rooms every single day, but not getting paid for it. Recently, people mounted a campaign on social media attacking Stephen Fry for his relentless onscreen presence – as if it was something he could control.

Ant McPartlin – one half of Ant and Dec, the most successful hosting duo on British television – entered rehab after being fined £86,000 for drink-driving earlier this week. His gaunt face was a haunting reminder of the downsides of constantly being in the public eye. Ant and Dec, like Dale Winton, bring joy and fun into our sometimes drab lives, which is a high art form. Dale’s achievement was to make it look so effortless, even when he was feeling low.