Talk Show Host Mike Douglas Dies In Florida

But their parents are sure to remember Mike Douglas, whose afternoon program was a staple on North American TV screens between 1961 and 1982.

The affable host, who first became known as a singer in the 40s, died Friday in a Florida hospital.

The cause of his death wasn’t announced.

Douglas was a definite square at a time when radical chic was in vogue, but it never made any difference to his ratings. He remained popular right up until he retired in an incredible career that spanned three decades and an estimated 30,000 guests.

And his show was always an eclectic mix of the standard, the innovative and the bizarre.

He became the first to have a weekly celebrity ‘co-host’ share the stage with him, and in 1972 – in one of the strangest pairings in broadcasting history – it turned out to be John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They asked yippie Jerry Rubin to appear and while the results made Douglas uncomfortable, they turned out great television.

“He just got on my nerves,” Douglas remembered. “It sounded like this guy hated the president, the Congress, everyone in business, the military, all police and just about everything America stands for.”

But Lennon saved the day, acting as a buffer between the radical and the rest of staid North America.

On another occasion, Douglas brought Moe Howard, the last surviving member of the original Three Stooges, back from obscurity for a memorable pie-fighting contest.

Then there was the day in 1974 when Kiss member Gene Simmons in full make-up met comedienne Totie Fields, an encounter that had to be seen to be believed.

And it was in 1976 that Douglas introduced the world to a young golf playing phenom at the age of just two years old, who putted against comedian Bob Hope. His name: Tiger Woods.

Douglas never viewed his show the way others did.

“People still believe The Mike Douglas Show was a talk show, and I never correct them, but I don’t think so,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir, I’ll Be Right Back: Memories of TV’s Greatest Talk Show. “It was really a music show, with a whole lot of talk and laughter in between numbers.”

It was that modest attitude that kept him at the top for so long.

“Mike Douglas was an old-fashioned traditionalist, holding down the fort while the culture was changing,” assess Prof. Robert Thompson, a pop culture specialist in Syracuse. “He was always the very friendly talk show host, nice to everybody. He would lean toward his guest as if he really cared. He owned that territory.”

The soft-spoken host only had one Top 40 hit after his big band days were through. It was an almost spoken word tune called “The Man In My Little Girl’s Life” and had a similar theme to the Fiddler on the Roof classic “Sunrise, Sunset”.

Douglas’ final sunset came at 5:30am, and his demise came as a shock to his family. He’d only been admitted to the hospital the day before, after becoming dehydrated on the golf course a few weeks ago.

“He was coming along fine, we thought,” his wife Genevieve reveals. “We never anticipated this to happen.”

Douglas passed away on his birthday – he had just turned 81.

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