ITV Sport host Dickie Davies dead at 94
He was best known as host of World of Sport
Tributes have been paid to former ITV Sport personality Dickie Davies, who has passed away at the age of 94 his family have announced. The presenter was best known as the host of Saturday afternoon live sport magazine show World of Sport (LWT) from 1968 to 1985. He also hosted many other sports programmes for ITV including boxing, snooker, FA Cup final and Olympic coverage.
As well as sports coverage he also ventured into other hosting roles including fronting LWT’s Sun Television Awards and Channel 4 game show Jigsaw. He also made many guest appearances on shows across the decades right up until 2018 ranging from Celebrity Squares and Give Us A Clue to Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and Sport Relief.
Born Richard John Davies on the 30th of April 1928. Born and raised in Wallasey and did his national service with the RAF before working as a purser on the Queen Mary. His first job in broadcasting was as an announcer for Southern Television which operated the ITV franchise for the south of England from 1958 to 1981. In 1965 he moved over to ITV Sport (produced primarily by ABC TV) as a reporter and stand-in host on World of Sport which was overseen by Eamonn Andrews. Three years later the show was revamped by new production company London Weekend Television and Davies was elevated to the permanent main anchor of the show.
The Sun TV Awards 1974, LWT/ITV
Dickie hosted the Saturday afternoon sports magazine programme for almost two decades, dealing with five hours of television most weekends. World of Sport, launched to rival BBC One’s Grandstand, offered often alternative sports output to what the BBC had gained rights to – most fondly remembered was the wrestling coverage with legendary names such as Big Daddy. There was also a mix of other sports including horse racing and speedway.
Davies remained with ITV Sport until the end of the 1980s thereafter switching to Eurosport and later adding a regular hosting role on Classic FM as their sports news presenter.
In 1995, Davies suffered a stroke which forced him to give up his work on Classic FM however in recent years he made many guest appearances on television programmes including saying farewell to the ITV Studios on London’s Southbank, in 2018, which had opened as the London Weekend Television Centre in the 1970s where World of Sport spent most of its life. This goodbye to the facilities, which were due to close and be demolished, saw Dickie reunited with some of the typists who had been seen regularly sitting behind him on Saturday afternoons typing away the sports reports.
ITV Sport presenter Jim Rosenthal:
“He was a superstar in those days but you wouldn’t have known it. He had time for everyone and everything. When World of Sport had their Christmas party, Dickie Davies very quietly paid for all the drinks, and that summed up the man.”
