Kennedy was shot

Shaking off the traveller's dust from my boots, I'm still trying to understand the astonishing Telegraph piece where Sarah Kennedy fumes at rumours she was drunk during one of her Radio 2 programmes:

Kennedy admitted that she had done a bad edition of her Dawn Patrollers show on Radio 2 in early August, during which she had sounded slurred, but put it down to not having slept the night before.

“I wasn’t sleeping. I was grieving from two unexpected deaths and I had got into a right tiswas with my sleep. I live near Wormwood Scrubs prison and that night there had been a police helicopter with its noise and its lights. Then the police started, with their dogs. I took a sleeping pill but I overrode it. I just couldn’t sleep. But you can’t just ring the BBC and say I can’t come in.

“I agree that I sounded slurred. I have a lazy tongue, if I’m not giving it my all.”

Kennedy also blamed her Radio 2 producer, Mark Hagen, who she said had not told her there had been a problem with her show. “What’s the point of a producer if he allows you to do a bad show and go home thinking it was OK?” said Kennedy. “If the producer doesn’t say, ‘You’re sounding slurred’, what the ****’s the producer there for? We could have put records on back-to-back. That happens when people are being sick in waste baskets.”

So according to Kennedy, it's impossible to ring up and tell the BBC you're sick, but your producer will quite happily let you sit in the studio while he plays records back to back because you're too unwell to work?

I was going to have a go at Kennedy for blaming everyone but herself for her bad show, but I suppose she did at least have the grace to include her tongue as one of the many conspirators who brought her down, alongside the police, prisoners at the Scrubs, her producer, manufacturers of inadequate sleeping pills and the rest of the world. Mind you, she even makes her tongue sound like an outside agent of collusion rather than part of her own body.

In addition, Kennedy then started trying to work out who claimed she had been broadcasting drunk (apparently unaware that 'anyone who heard this or many other of her shows' is the answer to that one):

“I have no quibble with the BBC,” said Kennedy. “But please put this in your piece. I would give my two feet to know who’s got it in for me at the BBC. Is it Alan Dedicoat? I have known for an awfully long time that I have got an enemy at the BBC and I would love to know who it is.

“I go in and I smile and I do my best. I don’t do the politics. You don’t see me in Boujis. You don’t see me in The Grey Horse or wherever it is they go. Chris Moyles - I’ve never met. Dermot O’Leary - I’ve never met. Yet they’re believing in these urban myths.

She doesn't get involved in the politics. But she will happily name names to the Telegraph and insist they appear in print.

Still, she's leaving Radio 2 with her head held high:

“Sometimes you have to step away,” said Kennedy. “I walked out of Game for a Laugh, I walked out of Busman’s Holiday. You know when it’s time.”

Busman's Holiday? Surely that's just a step-up from saying 'I turned my back on the six items or less checkout in Morrisons the other day'?

Kennedy

In our school, a Kennedy was a bizarre move whereby someone would attempt to knee you in the chest with an almost balletic movement while shouting "Kennedy" - we think it was a result of overexposure to that ITV trailer for the docudrama about the family which consisted solely of clips of the show where people said "Kennedy."

On Radio 2, however, it's a reactionary old bag who used to be straight person to Jeremy Beadle, taken apart with deft filleting movements by TV Cream's Creamguide [You'll need to subscribe, but, really, you need to subscribe anyway]. The best bit of a long list of complaints against Sarah's presntational style (Lynda Lee Potter with a wind-up gramophone, apparently) is this:

"Sarah once played the sublime 'Never Let Her Slip Away', and every time the title was mentioned in the lyrics she interrupted the song to shout out "Split infinitive!" There has never been a more infuriating three minutes of radio broadcasting in the history of this country.

Note to Creamguide: We didn't ask permission to use this, but there's no rules about stealing things from the Internet, is there?