Lorna McDonald
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Lorna McDonald was a blonde fashion model from the Lucy Clayton agency who, in the 1960s, became famous, though anonymously, as the young woman who jumped into Simon Dee’s white open-top E-type Jaguar car at the end of each edition of BBC television's chat show, Dee Time (1967-9) [1].
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[edit] Dee Time closing credits
Dressed in a mini-skirt and “kinky”-style boots, McDonald’s image was seen every Saturday evening [2] by as many as 14 million people [3] as she was driven away by Dee Time's host, the sports jacketed Simon Dee.
[edit] Filming
The sequence, which was overseen by the show's producer, Terry Henebery, was filmed at the entrance to the Piccadilly Plaza hotel in Manchester, the location of Dee Time before it moved to London in September 1967. It was McDonald's own idea to jump over the door after being asked by Henebery if she could get into the car more quickly. The cameraman was in the boot, from where he continued to film as Dee drove McDonald around the city. At one point, McDonald appeared to be emitting a "cry of ecstasy", but, as Henebery recalled many years later, she was actually in pain because she had caught her leg under the dashboard [4].
[edit] "Bond girl" manquée
Simon Dee had initially risen to public attention in 1964 as the first disc jockey (DJ) to be heard on the "pirate" station Radio Caroline. Though his period of fame was relatively short and his subsequent move from the BBC to London Weekend Television catastrophic for his career, Dee typfied in many ways the spirit and "look" of the "swinging" sixties. Journalist and DJ Anne Nightingale has referred to him as the "James Bond of DJs" [5]. In that sense, rather like Tania Mallet, a Lucy Clayton alumnus whose only film role was as Shirley Eaton's sister, Tilly Masterson, in the Bond movie Goldfinger (1964) [6], McDonald fulfilled admirably the role of "Bond girl" manquée [7]. Similarly, if actress Elizabeth Hurley was correct in her assertion that Simon Dee was the model for Austin Powers in the 1997 film, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery [8], then it is not hard to discern some similarities between Hurley's image in the latter as Vanessa Kensington and McDonald as Dee's companion.
[edit] Impact and context of the Dee/McDonald sequence
McDonald's Dee Time sequence has been described as both “iconic” of the times [9] and a "visual cliché" that lent itself to parody (for example, by comedian Benny Hill) [10]. Indeed, Dee's biographer Richard Wiseman, who was associate producer of a "one-off" revival of Dee Time for Channel 4 in 2003, considered that the scene was what "most people who lived in Britain during the Sixties will remember him for" [11]. Fellow DJ Tony Blackburn illustrated this when he recalled that, having been being advised by the head of BBC's Radio 1 (which opened a week after Dee Time moved to London) to drive a car more in keeping with his status as a "star", he chose an E-type "partly inspired by the famous Dee Time titles" [12].
[edit] Wider context
The sequence was illustrative of the wider use of stylish cars, especially sports cars, in the British mass media of the 1960s. Other examples included films, such as those of James Bond and, in 1969, The Italian Job, with its famous "getaway" scene; television series, including The Avengers and The Saint; and advertisements for petrol (gasoline), notably those for National [13] and Regent (featuring, in 1966-7, the Regent "cowgirl", Caroline Saunders [14]). The 1965 film Catch Us If You Can, an outlet for the rock group the Dave Clark Five, featured a scene similar to that of Dee and McDonald in which Dave Clark drove Barbara Ferris around London in an E-type.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Richard Wiseman (2006) Whatever Happened to Simon Dee?
- ^ Dee Time was initially broadcast twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday, but moved to Saturday evening on 23 September 1967.
- ^ Wiseman, op. cit.
- ^ See Wiseman, op.cit.
- ^ Quoted in Wiseman, op.cit.
- ^ See Adrian Turner on Goldfinger (Bloomsbury Movie Guide No 2, 1998)
- ^ Adrian Turner observed of Tania Mallet that, "if you qualify as a 'Bond Girl' by being a girl in a Bond film, then [she] qualifies. But if being a 'Bond Girl' means sleeping with Bond, thern Miss Mallet escaped by the skin of her ice-skates" (ibid.) In the early 1960s Mallet was a highly successful model.
- ^ Tim Teeman, The Times, 11 November 2006; Wiseman, op. cit
- ^ Wiseman, Introduction, op.cit.
- ^ screenonline: Dee, Simon (1935-) Biography
- ^ Wiseman, op.cit.
- ^ Quoted in Wiseman, op.cit.
- ^ "Getaway People Get Super National" (1965)
- ^ "Regent says that sex is the best policy": Jackpot, May 1967
