Brian Naylor

Former Melbourne television identity Brian Naylor (pictured) and his wife Moiree have been found dead after the horrific bushfires that have ravaged Victoria over the weekend.

The couple’s bodies were found tonight after they were reported unaccounted for after a blaze tore through the rural town of Kinglake.

More than eighty have been reported dead from fires burning around the state.

Naylor, 78, started in radio presenting commercials for his then employer, a paper mill in Melbourne, and then landed an announcing role at radio station 3DB.

With the advent of television in Melbourne, Naylor made the move from 3DB to its new sister station HSV7 as host of its children’s variety program Swallow’s Juniors (later Brian And The Juniors).

In 1970, Naylor joined the news team at HSV7 which was then struggling to topple rival GTV9 in the news ratings race.  By the mid-1970s, Seven National News with Naylor at the helm was winning the ratings – at the expense of Nine which had even lured former newsreading legend Eric Pearce out of retirement to try to claw back viewers from Seven.

In 1978, after two decades at Seven, Naylor was subject of one of the biggest coups in television when he accepted an offer to join GTV9, starting early in 1979 and eventually the viewers followed with National Nine News dominating through much of the 1980s and 1990s.

Ironically, it was Brian Naylor who presented an edition of National Nine News live on location from the streets of Cockatoo which had been destroyed in the horrific Ash Wednesday fires of 1983.

For many years, Naylor’s signature sign-off from the news was “May your news be good news and goodnight.”

Naylor also presented Melbourne’s Carols By Candlelight for ten years and in 1988 he was voted Victorian Father of the Year.

At the end of 1998, Naylor retired from television, ending a forty-year career.

Last year, Naylor lost son Matthew, 41, in an ultralight plane crash near their Kinglake property.

Source: Sky News, TV Tonight, TV Times