Sarah Kennedy



Sarah Mary Kennedy MBE (born 8 July 1950 in East Grinstead, West Sussex) is a British TV and radio broadcaster. She presented her own daily early morning radio show, The Dawn Patrol, on BBC Radio 2 from 1993, before announcing her decision to leave the show on 3 September, 2010.

In the Queen's Birthday Honours 2005 Kennedy was appointed as a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to broadcasting. ==Personal life [edit] ==

Sarah Kennedy was born in West Sussex. Her father was a stockbroker and her mother a nurse. She grew up in East Grinstead. She studied for two years at drama school, becoming a drama teacher. She was a matron at Copthorne Prep School.

In her twenties she married a member of the armed forces. She has a partner, Adrian McGlynn, a director of Weatherbys, to whom she refers as her "much beloved". He became a popular character in the show. He is 16 years younger than Kennedy. They met at the wedding of Desmond Morris's son, where McGlynn was best man. They reside in Bedfordshire although Kennedy has an apartment in a converted school building in London. ==Career history [edit] ==

Kennedy began her career with the British Forces Broadcasting Service in Singapore, before moving to BBC Radio 2 in 1976, where she presented Family Favourites and did the final closedown before the station moved to 24-hour broadcasting in January 1979. She is also president of the hospital radio station known as "Radio Horton", based in the Horton Hospital, Oxfordshire.

Kennedy's first on-screen job was reading the news on Southern Television's Day by Day. She came to prominence in TV as one of the hosts of the ITV light entertainment show Game for a Laugh from 1981 to 1984. 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. She also co-hosted The Animals Roadshow and Animal Country with zoologist Desmond Morris in the late 1980s and 1991 respectively.

In 1993, Kennedy returned to Radio 2, to present the weekday early morning show, called The Dawn Patrol. It was originally broadcast from 5am to 7am each day, but moved to the time-slot of 6 am to 7.30 am in 1994. In 1995, Kennedy received a prestigious Sony Gold Radio Award. She had a regular audience of around 4.5 million listeners on Radio 2. Due to Terry Wogan's retirement from his breakfast show in December 2009, the morning radio schedule was changed, and Kennedy returned to her former slot between 5am - 7am. It was announced on Friday 3 September 2010 that she was to leave her Radio 2 show. She had been absent for several weeks beforehand and would not return to the show before a shake-up of the schedules in October. Her programme was presented during this time by Lynn Parsons.

Kennedy has also published a novel, Charlotte's Friends, as well as two collections of listeners' tales, called Terrible Twos (two editions) and Terrible Pets.