What makes Ryan tick?
SPENDING time in the company of Ryan O’Connor can be exhausting. The KfmBreakfast presenter loses none of the manic energy he has on air and our appointment was soon after his show ended on a morning better suited to staying in bed.
What makes the man with the Cape’s longest-running breakfast show – into its ninth year with more than a million listeners – tick? It may just be his fine collection of more than 30 high-end wrist watches, many of which are investment pieces and are quite sought-after.
Today we’re watch shopping, with Ryan explaining the finer points of a pastime that I suggest is a fetish. Ryan corrects me and points out that it’s an obsession.
Michael Leibman who works at Charles Greigg at the V&A Waterfront, a store selling fine timepieces, greets Ryan warmly and it’s clear the two are well acquainted.
“I’ve always been fascinated with time, especially mechanical time – knowing that time can be put together, stuck on a wrist and run off a simple movement.
“In my line of work, time is essential. I live my life between three hours of radio that goes according to a time frame where a minute late for news, a minute late for sport, a minute late for anything is a minute too much.
“But even before radio, I remember growing up and reading old National Geographic magazines and looking at Rolex adverts inside… actually cutting watches out of those magazines and putting them on my wrist.
“It was bizarre. I was the only laaitie at my school to probably ever have done that. I’d go: ‘One day, this is what I’m going to have, this is what I want to own’.”
Ryan’s impressive collection started when his dad gave him his “first real watch”, a Tag Heuer, on his 18th birthday.
“From then I’ve spent every moment I can that I have free obsessing over new products that have been released globally.
“Every guy loves to wear a timepiece. The only piece of jewellery, other than a wedding ring, that a guy will ever wear, is a watch. Once you cross that R30 000 to R50 000 mark, you’re starting to look at pieces that are more than just watches but investment pieces. So I’ve grown from not only enjoying pieces to actually investing and collecting pieces.”
Time is a constant theme in Ryan’s life. In due time he’ll become a household name across SA as presenter of M-Net’s new TV show PowerCoupleSA. The show’s first season airs in September, with a live finale planned for December.
Ryan gave himself no chance of landing the job. But as things turned out, video would claim the radio star.
“I was on holiday over Christmas and got a call from an agent to say M-Net wants to see me. I thought it was great. If it’s not Derek Watts from CarteBlanche, I’m safe, because whenever Derek Watts comes round to your house with a TV crew you know, you’re in the number two.
“They said it’s this new show that M-Net is putting together. They’ve done research on it and they’ve hand-selected a couple of people.
“I didn’t get too excited because I knew, in general, TV is shot in Joburg. If you want to be anywhere or anyone in TV, all the major headlining shows are shot out of Joburg. I always knew the chances of landing a TV gig were going to be minimal.
“They flew me up to the studios and when I arrived, there were faces of wellknown presenters. It’s like going to a football game and Lionel Messi is there and both of you audition for the role of the striker. You look around and you just know like: ‘What am I doing here? I played third side for Bothasig!’
“I looked around and saw this wonderful room filled with familiar faces and I thought, no listen, thanks for the free trip to Joburg and the muffins, they were great. I’ll do my bit and then I’ll head back home expecting to never hear from them ever again. That’s pretty much what happened.”
But a few weeks later Ryan got another call from M-Net to say they had narrowed the search down to five.
“That’s when it was revealed what show we were doing. It’s called PowerCouple
SA and it’s unlike any other show South Africa has ever seen. It’s a mix of various shows. So you get a bit of Survivor and a bit of BigBrother and mix all that, with a great bit of humour and characters people are going to love.
“Season one has already been done and is in the bag. It’s all shot in Cape Town and it’s a great tourism showcase for the city because we shoot at locations around the peninsula that are breathtaking. We do scenes shot in the harbour, the Waterfront, part of the wine route. The cinematography on season one is incredible.”
Ryan believes his radio experience helped him because they were given a script to study but had to wing it during the audition with whatever they had managed to memorise.
“I remember delivering this mumbo jumbo that I made up almost into a game show because I was just winging it. That’s the good thing about radio, because you learn to wing things really quickly. I did it, left and I could see on the producer’s face a look of: ‘This oke doesn’t know this show, he doesn’t really get the idea of what he’s doing here, but he’s got good presence, great handle of an audience, and is great off the cuff ’.”
Time then again became a precious commodity for Ryan and his collection of luxury watches were now working overtime. His schedule was something like: arrive for work at 4.30am for his radio show, leave at 9am, rush over to the set of
PowerCouple and often film till midnight. This carried on for a good few weeks.
At the same time, the most significant occasion in the lives of Ryan and his wife Karen was happening.
The couple had been trying for more than 10 years to fall pregnant and in 2012 had a grave setback. But a few weeks ago, a tiny miracle named Faith rushed into their lives.
“The world, as you know it, comes to a grinding halt. The most important thing in your world right now is this tiny person – and when I say tiny, she was 28cm, 1.8kg. She really was this tiny, little person.
“I knew from that moment on, nothing could compete with having this precious little human being in my hands. This was it, the highlight of my life was right here.
“So 2012 was a very tough year. When the doctors tell you it happens in one of 200 000 cases, when you’re that one the other 199 999 cases don’t matter. You are the one and the stats mean nothing when it happens to you and you lose a child going into labour. It’s a dreadful experience.
“You get to meet other people who’ve been through similar experiences and other people have tried forever and almost lost hope. And Hope was another great name we had in mind for Faith. We were looking at names, we wanted something that meant something to us. With our first daughter it was Grace.
“We tried for 10 years before falling pregnant. Along the way it was almost like: is this it for us? Do we now call it quits? Do we look at other means, look into adoption? There are a lot of beautiful babies out there looking for a mom and dad.
“And Faith was just that miracle. It happened and it’s been a great inspiration.
“Being born early, at 31 weeks, was also another panic.”
But Ryan adds, smiling: “She smaaks her food like her dad.”
Any good joke, the best comedian will tell you, is about timing. And it’s no different with Ryan on his breakfast show. Where there is a prank, Ryan is never far behind.
There was the time when he hid in the bush to scare the living daylights out of the writer of the FridayFiles in a dark game resort where the patrons were warned not to walk around unaccompanied.
But there are also the serious moments he captures. There is the time when he introduced Jenna Lowe, who died recently, to the world. Ryan was struck by the story of the young girl who suffered from pulmonary hypertension but championed organ foundation in her campaign, “Get me to 21”.
In my own fund-raising effort for Rape Crisis, while riding the Cape Town Cycle Tour, Ryan made a heartfelt appeal to listeners for two minutes and helped raise close to R100 000.
“Kids can phone in, grandparents can phone in, the old aunty at the back of Brackenfell can phone in and share recipes. It’s just easy to be able to communicate with us. To get that is not an easy thing, to appeal to everybody, because you are going to, at the same time, isolate a lot of other people who want maybe a stronger opinion.
“We won’t offer you that. We won’t offer you anything that’s going to make you very polarised in your opinion. What you’re going to get is a family, feel-good show. So when you ask them to open their wallets, or say become an organ donor in Jenna Lowe’s honour, immediately you get that response that any family would get. They’ll rally around it and get involved and they’ll give.”
Ryan got his break in radio by time after time banging on the door of veteran sports broadcaster Jeff Ayliffe, who lived in the neighbourhood in Edgemead and was working at Kfm.
Back then, Ryan was fresh out of high school and was studying theology. He had a taste of radio at Christian community radio station CCFM.
Ayliffe relented and took on Ryan as his runner. He worked for a year for no pay and Ayliffe eventually gave him a 60-second Monday soccer wrap slot.
Ryan was hooked. He eventually landed a 2am to 6am slot at Good Hope FM that he did for two years. He would stay on at Good Hope for 10 years – doing every show available in that time – and left on a high as the breakfast show presenter to take the same slot at Kfm.
“There was a fine line for me between looking at radio as a career and radio as a hobby – something that would be secondary to another form of study or main career. I remember having to make that decision very early in my radio career.
“Watching radio just shift and shape people’s lives in terms of being part of it, you’re almost like another family member. And I wanted that; it’s something I really wanted to do from a young age.”
Ryan just signed a new three-year deal with Kfm. With the arrival of Faith and his fledgling TV career, there is little time for his other big love – sport. It’s an area for Ryan where time is yet again an obsession.
Very few people know he has done the “holy grail” of cycling – a sub-three hour Cycle Tour – as well as a one hour, 36 minute Two Oceans half marathon.
A few years ago, he was diagnosed with epilepsy.
“Now, with having a kid and having a busy life, it’s tough to try and squeeze the runs in and the cycles in and getting into that routine of just doing it.
“But I also need to prove that with any medical condition you’re diagnosed with, don’t let it be a setback. Let it be something you can live with every day. Go out there and lose the weight you have to lose, which is a tough thing in Cape Town because there’s moerselekkerkos. I
smaak it!”