SARAH KENNEDY: Breakfast with Bunty

There are five million Dawn Patrollers and they rub along comfortably with Bunty Bagshaw, the name they give to Sarah Kennedy. She wakes them between 6 and 7.30am and it is only very occasionally that inappropriate or ill-formed words tumble out of Bunty’s mouth and the Dawn Patrollers tut-tut on the Radio 2 messageboard. “Very odd slurring, struggling to finish longer words, grammatical errors,” wrote one this week.

We should not exaggerate this. The BBC has emphasised that she was feeling unwell but was professional enough to honour her commitment to her listeners. And it is eight years since she called a vicar an old prune and suggested that a newsreader had soiled her underwear. Mostly the Dawn Patrollers enjoy her observations – she is credited with coining the term “white van man” and has since been made honorary president of the Ford Transit Club. As one critic put it, listening to her is like being mesmerised by the pronouncements of a homeless lady on a park bench: you have no choice but to listen.

This, clearly, is why Kennedy’s Radio 2 slot has lasted a monumental 15 years. What’s not to like? She is jolly, bright and, with the exception of the occasional politically incorrect remark about black people making good runners because of lions, an all-round good egg.

I interviewed her ten years ago. We met in her stunning flat, just south of the Thames, and it was impossible not to like her even if I did have to decline the glass of wine she offered at 11am – having been up since 4am, the time seemed right to her, she noted. She was warm, fun and generously delivered a great number of perfectly judged anecdotes. This made her seem open and friendly, though while they revealed her observational skills and her intelligence, there were no emotional revelations.

That may be significant. She grew up in East Grinstead, the oldest child of a stockbroker and a nurse, was educated at a convent and had a candlewick bedspread and Victoria sponges on her birthday. She could not be more solidly middle-class. Having done two years at drama school and worked briefly as a drama teacher (that is significant too – the woman can act) she worked as a tea-lady at the BBC until, at 24, she was offered a job with British Forces Broadcasting in Singapore. There she taught English to the Prime Minister’s son and felt homesick.

She later became the “bubbly blonde” presenter of Game for a Laugh, Busman’s Holiday, Animal Roadshow and Animal Country, and she has edited two bestselling books for Children in Need, and written a novel. She was married briefly in her twenties but now lives with an IT manager, her partner of 11 years, and five cats. She is 57, keen on HRT and phobic about hospitals.

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