Andrew O'Connor

Andrew O'Connor
Born	Andrew Mark O'Connor March 25, 1963 Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England

Andrew O'Connor (b. 1963) is an English actor, comedian, magician, television presenter and executive producer.

Biography

Although he enjoyed a short stint as a child actor, appearing as Tom Brill in the BBC mini-series The Canal Children in 1976, he made his mark as a children's magician, and won the Magic Circle's Young Magician of the Year prize in 1981.

After appearing in a number of variety shows on television, he was invited to join the cast of London Weekend Television's Copy Cats, a showcase featuring impressionists such as Bobby Davro and Gary Wilmot, in 1985. A second series, without Wilmot, followed in 1986. O'Connor received a writing credit for each series. His own children's show, Andrew O'Connor's Joke Machine soon followed, in which he told jokes and performed magic tricks and invited children to do the same.

In 1988, O'Connor also appeared regularly in short comedy sketches co-written by himself for the Observation round in ITV game show The Krypton Factor. In the same year, he took over from Jeremy Beadle as the presenter of the daytime game show, Chain Letters. He returned to acting to play the role of the computer in early 90's children's sci-fi show Kappatoo but it was his career as a quiz-show host that took off, and he subsequently presented the UK version of Talk About, moved to Saturday night prime time in 1991 with One to Win, and returned to daytime television with The Alphabet Game. This latter show was devised and produced by O'Connor, under the aegis of Objective Productions which he formed with Michael Vine. The formation of Objective Productions marked a turning point in O'Connor's career, and although he has made numerous on-screen appearances since then, as host, presenter or panelist, he has mainly worked behind the camera. He has produced numerous comedy and magic-related TV shows, perhaps the most notable being the critically acclaimed sitcom, Peep Show, and most of Derren Brown's programmes.

References

This page incorporated content from Andrew_O%27Connor_(actor), a page hosted on Wikipedia. Please consult the history of the original page to see a list of its authors. Therefor, this article is also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• Cover, The Magic Circular, Vol. 97, No. 1038, January 2003, andrew O’Connor, Performer, Presenter, Producer, page 16

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