This is taken from The Guardian:

Patrick Hannan
Journalist, broadcaster and witty commentator on Welsh affairs
by Meic Stephens
Monday 12 October 2009 18.24 BST

The journalist and broadcaster Patrick Hannan, who has died aged 68 after a short illness, kept his finger on the pulse of public life in Wales for more than 40 years. As industrial editor of the Western Mail and BBC Wales's political correspondent, and later as host of various radio programmes, he won a reputation as an incisive interviewer and witty commentator on Welsh affairs during a period of rapid economic and social change.

He also broadcast on BBC Radio 4, presenting the popular discussion programmes Out of Order and Tea Junction. He had a well-furnished mind that was both disciplined and wide-ranging in its grasp of what makes contemporary culture. Last week he and fellow contestant Peter Stead won Round Britain Quiz, their fifth triumph in 10 years.

Pat was a journalist to his fingertips and cared passionately for the independence of what he called his "trade". He saw Wales not through rose-tinted spectacles but through the prism of his own experience, bringing erudition and personal commitment to the task of tracking the country's industrial and political transformation during a turbulent period of its history.

Not once did he take sides in any dispute, and if his sardonic manner sometimes had a touch of the sarcastic, there was never any doubt that he was speaking the truth as he saw it. Provocative, yes, and often striking sparks off those he interviewed, he nevertheless earned the respect of captains of industry, politicians and mandarins of public bodies. Among many tributes, first minister Rhodri Morgan described him as "an extraordinarily talented and witty journalist and broadcaster".

Despite having been born in "the posh part" of Aberaman, a mining village in the Cynon Valley, where he was the doctor's son, he saw at first hand how a working-class community holds itself together in bad times and good, even if he was not quite of it, especially after receiving his secondary education at Cowbridge grammar school, a fee-paying establishment in the Vale of Glamorgan.

From there, in 1959, he went up to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he read history and first tasted newsprint as a contributor to the Courier, the college newspaper. As a contemporary, I remember him in debates and in the students' union, where undergraduates intent on joining the fourth estate in the real world often gathered over their coffee cups and the morning's papers. His was the most laidback manner of them all.

Pat's first job was as a reporter with the Western Mail in Cardiff, where he quickly learned the rudiments of journalism and made contact with the political life of Wales at every level. He was particularly good at unravelling the tribalist Labour politics of the south Wales valleys, and this became one of the themes of his first book, The Welsh Illusion (1999), which explored the persistence of myth in the face of incontrovertible evidence that, with the demise of heavy industry, the social fabric of Wales had changed utterly.

After his move to BBC Wales in 1970 Pat fronted the daily radio news programme Good Evening, Wales and, more recently, the Sunday talkshow Something Else and the weekly political programme Called to Order. His last documentary, in December 2008, was about the reformist backbencher Leo Abse, who had died earlier that year. The same urge to examine what politicians get up to informed all the programmes he made, to which he brought a rigorous manner and a verbal dexterity that were second to none. His television work included documentaries produced for BBC Wales, BBC Two and HTV Wales.

He published three more books. Wales Off Message (2000) traces the difficult birth of the National Assembly for Wales, in which he managed to bring out the comic side of things. His book 2001: A Year in Wales (2002) is a diary reflecting on the obsessions, feuds and ambitions of those who try to climb the greasy pole of politics: "In Wales we particularly resent strangers telling us what we already know and we are often willing to go to some lengths to prove them wrong, even if they're right."

When Arthur Met Maggie (2006), is about the miners' strike of 1984-85 and the clash of rival ideologies that have shaped our domestic world ever since. His last book, A Useful Fiction: Adventures in British Democracy, published this year, takes a wider view of the post-Thatcher years and the problems besetting the governments of Blair and Brown.

He leaves his wife, Menna Richards, director of BBC Cymru/Wales, and two sons and a daughter by his first marriage.

• Patrick Hannan, journalist, born 26 September 1941; died 10 October 2009