Decline
In June 1970, Dee joined his former Radio Caroline boss,
Ronan O'Rahilly, to campaign for pirate radio and against the Labour government's
Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, issuing a
poster of
Prime Minister Harold Wilson dressed as Chinese dictator
Mao Zedong. Pirate radio had become a political issue and, in the run up to the
general election that summer, Radio Caroline International launched a campaign in support of the
Conservative Party, which supported commercial radio. Dee later claimed that there was an Establishment plot against him because of his open opposition to Wilson, and recently released government files show that he was indeed being monitored by the
Security Service.
Having alienated both the BBC and independent television, Dee disappeared from the airwaves. He signed on for
unemployment benefit at the
Fulham labour exchange, occasioning considerable press coverage. Unable to revive his
show business career, he took a job as a
bus driver. He also had several court appearances and in 1974 he served 28 days in
Pentonville prison for non-payment of
rates on his former
Chelsea home.
Every time he left his cell, the prisoners on his wing shouted, "It's Siiiiiimon Dee!" He was so shocked by prison that he swore he would never get into debt again. On another occasion he was fined and cautioned for vandalising a lavatory seat with
Marilyn Monroe's face painted on it, which he thought was disrespectful to her. On another, later misdemeanor, the magistrate who fined him was the BBC's Head of Light Entertainment,
Bill Cotton.
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