Broadcaster Mark Colvin, who died yesterday aged sixty-five, is described by friends and colleagues as "precociously talented" and "a champion of radio" who "wrote up to audiences, not down to them." The veteran of TV and radio current affairs died at the Royal Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, surrounded by his family and some of the colleagues he has worked with at the ABC over several decades. "I've been expecting this moment for twenty years,” Jim Middleton said yesterday afternoon as he was getting off a plane from Sydney, where he was with Colvin when he died.