Simon Dee

I felt as if I should write about Simon Dee. It is not often that this blog gets a post because I feel as if I have to do it.

The reason, I suppose, is that Simon Dee stood in symbolic relation to his era. He was a blue-eyed blond. He had the right accent drifting from what was known as "mid-atlantic" into Chelsea poufter. Dee was the Sixties, just as the Beatles were the Sixties. It does not, however, mean that he was anywhere nearly as talented or interesting. In fact Simon Dee was a twit who got very lucky and then could not handle the fame. In those days, as now, Television could make a star out of a nobody. He was a template for the hundreds of ghastly wannabees who infest reality TV these days. We did, however, watch the show. We watched it, partly because there was nothing else to watch, and partly because he interviewed celebrities and partly because we all wanted the Jag and the girl in the mini dress he drove off with as the end credits ran. He had a kind of puerile charm that matched the decadent, fin de siecle feel of the swinging sixties. An object lesson in the way the media picks them up and spews them out, he was, for me, part of what made the Sixties very flawed; the drug-fueled oblivion, the narcissism and the sheer conspicuousness consumption of an emerging new elite who would become what we now worship as the cult of celebrity.

Anyway, he has died - painfully, but thankfully, fairly quickly in given the circumstances. So there he goes, Cyril Henty-Dodd, or to you and me...Siiiiiiiiiiiimon Dee!