Desmond Bernard O'Connor CBE (12 January 1932 – 14 November 2020) was an English comedian, singer and television presenter who went on to record 36 albums, perform in cabaret in Las Vegas, at Sydney Opera House and more than 1,000 times at the London Palladium.
O’Connor was born in Stepney, east London, the son of Harry O’Connor, a dustman, and Maude (nee Bassett), a cleaner. His mother was Jewish and his father was Irish, and Des joked he was the first O’Connor to celebrate his bar mitzvah. “We were poor when I was a kid, but there wasn’t a day when we didn’t laugh or have something to look forward to. You can sit down in a corner and cry, or you can get on with living.”
He suffered from rickets and wore calipers until he was six, when his father told him to throw them away. He was later badly injured in a hit-and-run car accident which meant he had to be in an iron lung for six months. He had a brother, William, and a sister, Patricia, one year his junior. He was evacuated to Northampton during the Second World War, where he worked in a shoe factory and was a schoolboy and reserves player with Northampton Town.
After the war he did his national service with the Royal Air Force. “Coming from a poor background, I’ve always felt the need to prove myself,” he told one interviewer. He realised for the first time he was unfit and uneducated, so started training and reading. “I’d like to say it’s the taking part, but it’s the winning,” he once said. “I came second in every race in the air force. So I trained and trained until I entered the marathon and won it.”
After completing his national service in the Royal Air Force, he worked as a Redcoat at Butlin's holiday camp in Filey, where he met his first wife Phyllis, and as a shoe salesman at Church's in Northampton, and for United Counties, both on the road and in the office, before entering show business. Prior to his break on television, his first fully professional stage appearance in variety, was in a Newcastle theatre. Later, while he was in Leeds, he invited the Welsh singer Shirley Bassey out on two dates. In 1958, when Buddy Holly toured the UK, O'Connor was the show's compere for which he was paid £100 per week.
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| Des with Buddy Holly |
In 1958 he, along with Robert Morley, Pete Murray and Ted Ray, became one of the regular hosts of Spot the Tune, the Granada TV game show in which contestants named a popular song after hearing a few bars of music. After five years, Granada TV hired him to headline his own variety show. The Des O’Connor Show, launched in 1963, became a huge hit in Britain and in America, establishing him as a prime-time entertainer. On the back of his television fame he launched his career as a singer and had his first hit single in 1967 with Careless Hands (a cover of a Mel Tormé song).
His second single, I Pretend, went to No 1, selling well more than a million copies. His third single, 1 2 3 O’Leary, became his final Top 10 hit of the 1960s; four more singles made the Top 20, though some, including Dick-A-Dum-Dum and Feelings, later garnered the dubious accolade of featuring in “worst records ever” lists.
The Des O’Connor Show, with a variety format that ran for the next decade. When ATV syndicated the show to CBS in America, O’Connor became a household name there too, leading to performances in Las Vegas and throughout the US. From then onwards he was seldom off the small screen.
O’Connor appeared alongside the great comedians Morecambe and Wise on many occasions. The duo would tease him relentlessly, making him the butt of the joke, with quips such as “Des in Des O’Connor is short for desperate” and “Des has just done a one-man show – let’s hope two turn up next time”, lines that it later transpired were written by O’Connor himself.
In 1977, he began hosting the chat show Des O’Connor Tonight, which ran for 25 years. In 2001, he signed a £3.7 million (€4.1 million) deal with ITV for a year’s work, making him Britain’s highest paid TV entertainer. The deal included four one-off specials and a lunchtime chat show, Today With Des and Mel, that he presented with Melanie Sykes. And in 2007 he replaced Des Lynam as the host of the Channel 4 quiz show Countdown. The following year he was appointed CBE.
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| Des with carol Vorderman |
In 2011, O’Connor starred in Dreamboats and Petticoats at the Playhouse Theatre in London, and the following year he replaced Russell Grant in the West End musical The Wizard of Oz at the London Palladium, as Professor Marvel. At the age of 85 he toured a two-man show with Jimmy Tarbuck, as well as his own one-man show it was about this time Des was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease.
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| Des with Jimmy Tarbuck |
He had experienced a fall at home in Buckinghamshire and had began to recover but relapsed and died peacefully in hospital on 14 November 2020. (Edited mainly from The Irish Times & The Independent)