Who was Simon Dee? By Andrew Roberts
Sixty years ago, on 28th March 1964, the first broadcast was made from Radio Caroline on Britain’s first pirate radio ship.
Simon Dee (1935-2009), aka Cyril Nicholas Henty-Dodd, made the initial announcement: ‘Hello, everybody. This is Radio Caroline, broadcasting on 199; your all-day music station.’
The Observer stated that Caroline planned ‘to broadcast modern light music records every day from 6am to 6pm’. Dee left his £45-per-week (plus commission) estate-agency job for £15 per week as a DJ.
Caroline broadcast from a former Danish passenger ferry anchored off the coast of Felixstowe, outside UK territorial waters. Its founder, Ronan O’Rahilly, responded to the demand for an all-day music channel, which the BBC’s Chairman reputedly compared to ‘having the pubs open all day’. The ‘needle time’ agreement had also restricted the number of records played by the Corporation.
Caroline’s DJs played the actual disc, instead of an interpretation by Bob Miller and the Millermen or any other BBC Light Programme band. While some Corporation presenters had the demeanour of youth-club leaders forced to play pop music, Dee had a friendly manner and was only 28. Within three weeks, Caroline had 6,840,000 listeners.
The BBC responded with ‘The Caroline Phenomenon’, a report with what sounds like a B-film title. One MP warned, ‘There is nothing to prevent their pouring out Communist or Fascist propaganda.’
Within four years, Dee had 18 million viewers a week as the host of BBC1’s Dee Time chat show. He issued the ‘Dee Code’ of moral guidance to his younger fans – and could be seen, off-duty, speeding along King’s Road in his Aston Martin DB5 convertible.
Dee appeared to be a middle-aged Establishment idea of a clean-cut young person. A 1966 Smith’s Crisps commercial featured a respectably short-haired DJ urging viewers to send 1/6d for their Crunch disc in the crisp tones of a head prefect.
This advertisement led to his presenting Dee Time the following year. In 1969, London Weekend Television offered Dee considerable financial inducements to move to ITV.
Within a year, his narrative became ‘the Simon Dee story’. Milton Shulman derided Dee’s ‘hitherto unplumbed quality of inanity’ and London Weekend poorly scheduled his short-lived show. Furthermore, as management at Caroline and the BBC could attest, the DJ was known to be ‘difficult’.
Dee claimed, ‘It was perfectly obvious that the CIA, who controlled our media and still do, would be on my case.’
After 1970, his fate, as sympathetically described by Richard Wiseman in Whatever Happened to Simon Dee? (2005), was to be for ever referred to in the past tense.
The following years until his death in 2009 saw a dispiriting saga of unemployment, a prison sentence for non-payment of rates and various short-lived comebacks. Mental turmoil was little understood in the 1960s and 70s.
The surviving footage of Dee Time – only two complete editions exist – now appears utterly quaint, with the Jaguar E-Type in the closing credits and self-conscious ‘Swinging London’ trappings, like a real Austin Powers.
Dee seems to belong in a black-and-white, pre-decimal money era. But six decades ago, he represented freedom to young listeners with a transistor radio. Andrew Roberts
