Sarah Kennedy Official Website

The Guardian salutes our Sarah
The following high-quality piece of journalism comes from today's Guardian newspaper. Well done to them!

Sarah Kennedy (Friday, Radio 2) does nothing frantically. You wouldn't want her to, given that her show starts at 6am. It's a sleepy, otherworldly ("I've always wondered what Red Bull is all about; I didn't know if it was alcoholic or not") and cosy programme - the radio equivalent of a crocheted tea-cosy - presented by Kennedy in a style that has top notes of Terry Wogan and Pam Ayres, and yet is all her own. As a presenter, she has a knack of creating quite powerful visual pictures, some of which you rather wish she hadn't.

Last weekend, for example, Kennedy heard "a great thundering like wilderbeasts in the spare room". It was, as she expected, a cat playing with a vole. "The vole," she explained with much pathos, "did a runner. The vole shot down a hot pipe. The smell ... as you can imagine." Yes, the vole melted, leaving a house so smelly ("we've got two Airwicks, the stuff you stick in plugs and we've even burned incense") that she has had to cancel impending lunch guests who were lined up "for pasta and salad".

As Radio 2's only female presenter in the weekday schedules - an imbalance it would be good to see rectified now that the station has a female controller - Kennedy is to be treasured. Her style may be quirky ("Are cockles and winkles the same thing? It's a winkly problem," she ponders, oddly, on news of the deaths at Morecambe Bay), but somehow she makes perfect sense in that half-waking, half-snoozing state so much of her early audience must inhabit.