Eric Morley, who died on November 9th aged 82, had a genius for publicity, which sometimes blew up in his face. He was the promoter of Mecca dancehalls and BBC television's Come Dancing series, and, most conspicuously, the creator of the Miss World contest - for which he was the object of hostility from feminists who thought the show demeaning to women, and of many other people who thought it merely tacky.
Eric Morley was a voluble, self-made Cockney with an ability to put people's backs up without consciously trying, and then turn the resultant fracas into publicity. He recalled with pride that he had been born in an East End warehouse - or at least to humble parents in London's Holborn. He was educated at Whitstable Grammar School and the royal naval training ship, HMS Exmouth. His father died when he was two and, before he was 12, his mother and stepfather had also died. At 14, he became an army boy bandsman, playing the French horn.
Demobbed in 1946 as Capt Morley, Royal Army Service Corps (Motor Boats), he remembered himself as an acting major. He took charge of publicity at Mecca, then run by Carl Heimann and Alan Fairley. He started Come Dancing with the BBC in 1949 as a welcome relief from the dowdiness and austerity of the war years.
When he heard that the 1951 Festival of Britain was to feature a beauty contest, Eric Morley saw himself as the ideal man to handle the publicity. He then assumed responsibility for the whole event.
By the following year, he was general manager of Mecca's dancing division, the year after that he was a director, and, in 1954, he joined the board of the parent company, Mecca Ltd. In 1960, he married Julia Rogers, a former model he had met at Mecca's Leeds dancehall and who was to become his right-hand woman in running Miss World.
By 1962, Eric Morley was Mecca's joint assistant managing director and, in 1969, he became managing director and a director of Grand Metropolitan Hotels, which took over Mecca the following year. He became joint chairman and managing director of Mecca and, in 1971, sole chairman and managing director.
The number of "joint" appointments suggested that the view of him as a usefully berserk NCO had adherents within Mecca and Grand Metropolitan; while the appointments of extremely short duration suggested that he did not suffer equals gladly.
But Maxwell Joseph, head of Grand Metropolitan recognised Eric Morley's value sufficiently to allow him to report to him directly, bypassing two accountant deputies. At one stage, he controlled 100 dancehalls and 700 betting shops.
Eric Morley had little respect for accountants, who he saw as incapable of creative leadership in the entertainment field. But he did not bother to disguise that lack of respect.
It was perhaps his uneasiness within the bureaucracy that led him to seek fresh fields. He stood as Conservative candidate for Dulwich in 1974, although Labour's Sam Silkin saw him off, as he did again in 1979. Nonetheless, Eric Morley's Who's Who entry, presumably self-written, declared that he "reduced the majority of the then attorney-general from 7,500 to 122".
By 1978, the pressure to unseat him at Mecca and Grand Metropolitan had become explosive. Eric Morley resigned from the Mecca chairmanship and the Grand Metropolitan board with a £200,000 handshake, and the promise that he could run Miss World. When Grand Met pulled the plug on the BBC's use of Mecca ballrooms for Come Dancing, Eric Morley's wife said it was only because it was her husband who was running it.
The beauty contest was rather more lucky. The 1970 Miss World, compered by Bob Hope at the Royal Albert Hall, coincided with the birth of the women's liberation movement, and became the target of feminist protest and flour-bomb attacks. It was a public relations disaster which focused public unease about the event. Yet, despite demonstrations and scandals, Miss World tottered on, even when, in 1980, the BBC decided to leave it to the embrace of more commercial arms.
That Who's Who entry emphasised Eric Morley's charitable work - with his wife, he raised more than £100 million. It revelled in the size of the Miss World television audience (more than 1.5 billion in 115 countries in 1995), and in his introduction of commercial bingo to Britain in 1961.
Determined, self-hyping, slightly innocent, Eric Morley was a maverick. He is survived by his wife Julia and four sons. His daughter predeceased him.
Eric Morley: born 1918; died, November 2000