Paddy O’Byrne: Velvet-voiced maestro of radio’s golden years
1929-2013
PADDY O’Byrne , who has died at his home in Mullingar, in Ireland, was one of the stars of South African broadcasting in its golden days, when radio was king and television was nowhere.
He was born in Killiney, County Dublin, on December 8 1929.
His father was a respected supreme court judge and an attorney-general of Ireland. Though O’Byrne had always wanted to pursue a career in entertainment, he read law at University College, Dublin, in deference to his father’s wish that he follow in his footsteps.
After graduating with a couple of law degrees, he was called to the bar in 1952 and practised as a barrister before emigrating to England in 1954.
There he worked on the variety stage, doing some singing among other things.
He met his wife, Vicki, a dancer, and called her “Old Vic” after the West End theatre.
He found his Irish name a bit of a handicap and, with the extraordinary wealth of talent in London at the time, didn’t rate his chances in the theatre very highly.
In 1958 he came to South Africa with his wife and baby daughter, Jane.
In 1960 he won the Voice of a South African competition.
Part of the first prize was a commission to read a serial for the English service of the SABC.
He remained a broadcaster for the rest of his working life.
When he went across to Springbok Radio he became the whipping boy of an autocratic, right-wing Afrikaner bully who ran the place.
This man hated foreigners and resented O’Byrne for his ability, something that he desired but did not have.
It was during this time that star broadcaster Eric Egan was fired because someone on the corporation’s board had decided he wasn’t a patriotic, true South African. Someone would have to sit in the control room with his finger hovering over the “off” button in case Egan said something politically incorrect.
And so O’Byrne and the other foreigners on Springbok Radio had to mind what they said and generally did.
In the late 1960s he interviewed the formidable German-born US singer and actress Marlene Dietrich, an avowed anti-Nazi who became an American citizen and entertained Allied troops during the war.
Most Germans regarded her as a traitor but O’Byrne didn’t know this.
How wonderful it must have
He called his wife, Vicki, a dancer, ‘Old Vic’ after the theatre in London’s West End
been for her, going back to Berlin after the war, and what a warm reception she must have had, warbled O’Byrne at the start of the interview. She gave him an icy stare and said: “You obviously don’t know much about me — they put a bomb in my dressing room.”
He never quite lived that one down but O’Byrne was fast on his feet and good at witty repartee. A studio assistant was bemoaning the fact that he had never got a degree.
“Don’t worry, lad”, responded O’Byrne, “you can have one of mine.”
He was in many of the radio plays that gripped the nation in those days, including the series No Place To Hide, written by Adrian Steed. He played the world’s strangest investigator, Mark Saxon.
He was also an authority on music and co-hosted Going For a Song on Springbok Radio in the 1970s for four years.
His co-host was cabaret star Annabel Linder, for whom he wrote many songs, often in a couple of minutes or so on the back of a serviette in a restaurant. One of them was A Widescreen Broad. The first line: “I’m looking for a place in the world of Jamie Uys ’cause I want to be a widescreen broad” brought the house down for years.
O’Byrne was invited to Hollywood to narrate Uys’s hugely successful film Beautiful People and the subsequent international hits The Gods Must Be Crazy 1 and 2.
After retiring, O’Byrne returned to Ireland with his wife and daughter, who had decided she did not want to bring up her children in crimeriddled South Africa.
O’Byrne, once a heavy smoker, had been living with lung cancer for 15 years and had had a lung removed. But the last scan showed that his cancer had been almost eradicated. O’Byrne died of heart failure. He is survived by two children.
A third child, John, died in 1980. — Chris Barron