Sarah Mary Kennedy MBE[1][2] (born 8 July 1950)[3] is a British retired TV and radio broadcaster.
[4] In the 2005 Queen's Birthday Honours, Kennedy was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire "for services to broadcasting".
[5] Kennedy began her career with the British Forces Broadcasting Service in Singapore in 1973,[6] before moving to BBC Radio 2 in 1976,[7] initially as a newsreader and continuity announcer.
She was also one of the team involved with the short-lived BBC current affairs programme 60 Minutes, which ran from 1983 to 1984, and was the main presenter of the ITV game show Busman's Holiday for several series in the 1980s.
Kennedy returned to Radio 2 to present the weekday early morning show The Dawn Patrol, which ran between 4 January 1993 and 13 August 2010.
This included calling Ken Bruce an "old fool" and referring to the presenter of the day's "Pause for Thought" slot as "a stupid old prune".
In October 2007, she was reprimanded after joking (in a segment about the importance of wearing visible clothing in winter road conditions) that she had almost run over a black pedestrian because she "couldn't see him in the dark".
[19] Following her departure from BBC Radio 2, she received considerable criticism for alleged excess consumption of alcohol.
In a report, it was stated that Kennedy drank four glasses of wine over several hours to alleviate back pain, and did not realise she was over the legal limit.