Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy, FRSL (3 November 1919 – 18 October 2009) was a Scottish journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author.

As well as his wartime service in the Royal Navy, he is known for presenting many current affairs programmes and for reexamining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley.

Kennedy was schooled at Eton College (where he played in a jazz band with Humphrey Lyttelton) and studied for a year at Christ Church, Oxford, until the outbreak of war.

[3] Kennedy's father, by then a retired captain, returned to the navy and was given command of HMS Rawalpindi, a hastily militarised P&O ocean liner, known as an armed merchant cruiser, that was used on the Northern Patrol.

Kennedy was posthumously mentioned in dispatches and his decision to fight against overwhelming odds entered the folklore of the Royal Navy.

From 1953, he edited and introduced the First Reading radio series on the BBC Third Programme, presenting young writers such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin.

[9] In 1957 Kennedy made a guest appearance as a newsreader in the Scotland Yard supporting feature series episode The Lonely House.

He wrote and presented a substantial number of television documentaries for the BBC on maritime history in the Second World War, beginning with Scapa Flow, followed by the dramatic narrative of the sinking of the Bismarck in which he was involved.

In 1980 he presented an episode of the BBC television series Great Railway Journeys of the World, in which he crossed the United States.

He appeared as himself in several episodes on the political comedy series Yes Minister, often being called "Ludo" by Jim Hacker and Humphrey Appleby.

One of the first miscarriages of justice he investigated was the conviction and hanging of Timothy Evans in his 1961 book Ten Rillington Place (ISBN 978-0-586-03428-6).

In 1985, Kennedy published The Airman and the Carpenter (ISBN 978-0-670-80606-5), in which he argued that Richard Hauptmann did not kidnap and murder Charles Lindbergh's baby, a crime for which he was executed in 1936.

He lost to the Labour candidate, Jack McCann, but achieved an increase in the Liberal vote, pushing the Conservatives into third place.

A lifelong atheist, he published All in the Mind: A Farewell to God in 1999, in which he discussed his philosophical objections to religion, and the ills he felt had come from Christianity.

He later remembered their meeting in 1949, when he was reluctantly persuaded by a friend to accept a complimentary ticket to a fancy dress ball held at the Lyceum ballroom in London.

Shearer – who had recently become famous for her role in The Red Shoes – was presenting the prizes at the occasion, and Kennedy later recalled that "I felt a tremor run through me when I caught sight of her.