As the unflappable presenter of World of Sport for almost two decades, Dickie Davies, who has died aged 94, was distinctive for the white quiff in his fringe and a name that stuck in people’s minds.
In 1965 when he first filled in as the summer replacement for Eamonn Andrews on ITV’s Saturday afternoon answer to the BBC’s Grandstand, he was billed as Richard Davies. Three years after taking over as the regular presenter in 1968, he was given some advice by Jimmy Hill, the football player and manager-turned-TV executive who was head of sport at LWT, which produced the programme.
“My wife called me Dickie but, in the television world, it was considered Richard sounded much more proper,” recalled Davies. “On our way to a game of golf one day, Jimmy said, ‘Why don’t you just tell them you want to be known as Dickie?’ The difference it made was phenomenal.”
Hill completed the transformation by encouraging Davies to wear the dapper suits for which he was known off screen and to grow a moustache and sideburns. Over the next 17 years, until World of Sport was axed in 1985, these attributes – combined with a beaming smile – made Davies one of TV’s most recognisable stars. Later, hosting programmes on single sports events, he donned his tuxedo to present the richest fight in boxing history, Marvin Hagler v Sugar Ray Leonard, from Las Vegas (1987).
At its height, World of Sport’s five-hour programme would begin with the football preview show, On the Ball, and end with the day’s results. Sandwiched in between would be live horse racing and professional wrestling, which gained a cult following for its showbiz approach to pre-recorded bouts featuring Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Jackie Pallo, Mick McManus and others who became household names, along with the commentator Kent Walton.
Davies said: “I was never a great wrestling fan. I never thought of it as a sport, but we used to get six to 10 million people watching it every Saturday, so the success of it can’t be denied.”
World of Sport filled the rest of its schedule with domestic sports such as golf, darts, speedway, rallying and angling, along with a curious mix of minority sports bought in from abroad such as cliff diving, log rolling and barrel jumping – largely a necessity because the BBC had bought the rights to most major events. The programme was axed after horse racing moved to Channel 4 and ITV looked to move up market.
Born in Wallasey, Cheshire (now in Merseyside), he was the son of Ellen (nee Owen) and Owen Davies and attended William Ellis school, north London, and Oldershaw grammar school in Wallasey. Following national service in the RAF, he worked as a clerk in an amusement arcade at New Brighton. He then joined Cunard and became assistant purser on the Queen Mary, beginning 10 years at sea. He was eventually head purser on the Queen Elizabeth, organising the entertainment – “a glorified redcoat”, as he described it.
During time on dry land in New York, he discovered his passion for snazzy suits, bought from the Suicide Shop on Third Avenue, which sold clothes straight out of the city’s mortuary – some previously worn by gangsters.
A cruise passenger who worked for the American TV network NBC recognised Davies’s talent behind the microphone as he called bingo and introduced the ship’s entertainment turns, and advised him to look for work in television. After arriving back in Southampton, Davies met the broadcast journalist Julian Pettifer, who secured him an interview at Southern Television, the ITV company broadcasting to the south and south-east of England.
As a result, in 1961, he left the high seas behind and landed a job as an announcer. He also read the news on the regional magazine programme Day By Day and hosted the 1962 and 1963 runs of the talent show Home Grown.
During his years on World of Sport, Davies also presented the magazine programme Sportsworld from 1972 to 1977 and the football challenge show All in the Game (1976-77), as well as hosting other events such as boxing, the European athletics championships and the European and world figure skating championships.
He fronted coverage of four Olympic Games (1968, 1972, 1980 and 1988) and continued to present FA Cup finals, boxing, snooker and gymnastics events. A popular guest on TV game shows, Davies hosted one himself for Channel 4, Jigsaw (1987), and devised and presented the ITV quiz show Sportsmasters (1989-90), retitled Grand Sportsmasters for its final run in 1991.
That year, Davies anchored the satellite channel Eurosports’s snooker coverage before becoming sports editor (1992-95) of the newly launched radio station Classic FM, presenting bulletins from a studio in his home six days a week. In 1995, he suffered a stroke, which affected his speech, but he recovered it through therapy.
He then presented TV shows for Sky such as Bobby Charlton’s Football Scrapbook (1995-99), analysing classic football matches with players who took part, and Dickie Davies’s Sporting Heroes (1998). In 2005, he returned to ITV to host a one-off World of Sport special as one of the programmes marking the network’s 50th anniversary.
In 1962, Davies married Liz Hastings, who worked with him at Southern Television as a vision mixer. She survives him, along with their twin sons, Daniel and Peter, and four grandchildren.
• Dickie (Richard John) Davies, television presenter, born 30 April 1928; died 19 February 2023
