Paddy O'Byrne

(b. Killiney, Co. Dublin, 08/12/1929 - d. Mullingar, Ireland, 04/12/2013). Broadcaster, actor. Patrick O’Byrne was the son of a high court judge in Ireland and studied law himself, but in 1961, after coming to South Africa, he won a competition intended to find a new voice for SABC Radio and subsequently became one of the most popular announcers in the country. A naturally gifted broadcaster, he was a newsreader, interviewer, presenter of music programmes and actor. He was responsible for the popular Sunday At Home and was the last actor to play the role of Mark Saxon, “the world’s strangest investigator”, in the long-running serial No Place To Hide (1958-1970). For some time he worked as a broadcaster at the BBC, but in 1980 he and his family returned to South Africa, where he helped to launch a commercial radio station called Channel 702 (later Radio 702) and specifically Talk Radio, which broadcast from the homeland of Bophuthatswana. Back at the SABC he took over the programme Top of the Morning and later teamed up with Vuyo Mbuli, who predeceased him on 18 May 2013. After he finally left the SABC, O’Byrne joined the community radio station Radio Today, but in the late 1990s he retired to his native Ireland. In South Africa he made his first stage appearance in Anthony Farmer’s musical Ever Since Eve (1958), while he was also associated with filmmaker Jamie Uys, appearing in Die Professor en die Prikkelpop / The Professor and the Beauty Queen (1967) and narrating such films as The White South Africans / Die Blanke Suid-Afrikaners (1965), We Are Marching to Pretoria (1968), The Great Adjustment / Die Groot Aanpassing (1968), The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) and The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1988), as well as Crazy Safari (Billy Chan/1991) and U’bejani (Wayne Crawford/1995). (FO)