The prospect of Zoe Ball ever becoming the BBC’s highest-paid female presenter would have seemed outlandish when she made her name as the face of “ladette” culture in the 1990s.
Ball became the first woman to present the Radio 1 breakfast show in October 1997, six months after Tony Blair’s first landslide, and became for some the definition of Cool Britannia. She partied hard with popstars, so much so that she often came into the studio either still drunk or very hungover. She got married to a superstar DJ, only for their marriage to reportedly be marred by infidelity and alcohol abuse before breaking down. She has been to rehab and, after years of trying, got sober.
In the past two decades she has managed to transform her image into one of Auntie’s darlings, however, and has spent the last six years hosting the Radio 2 breakfast show. She is also the first woman to present the BBC’s biggest morning programme, while her salary of up to £955,000 puts her behind only Match of the Day’s Gary Lineker in the annual pay rankings. Though she has overseen a fall in listener figures – some 6.3 million tuned in on average each week, compared with almost nine million for her predecessor, Chris Evans – Ball has been a relatively steady presence. Unlike Lineker, say, she has never brought the BBC into disrepute.
She will likely soon take a hefty pay cut. Ball is ditching the 4am alarm calls, to be replaced on Radio 2 by Scott Mills. “I’m not going to be a stranger,” she told listeners on Tuesday morning. “I’m staying in the Radio 2 crew and family because it’s an amazing family.” More on that is promised in the new year; her last breakfast show is on December 20.
Her decision to quit comes at the end of an annus horribilis for Ball. She took much of the summer off work (with Mills covering) following the death from pancreatic cancer of her mother, Julia. She was also diagnosed with ADHD last year, while her relationship with the model and construction company owner Michael Reed broke down.
Ball has packed in more than most 53-year-olds. Along with her colleague Sara Cox, she became synonymous with the hedonistic excesses of the Britpop era, often photographed stumbling out of clubs, drink in hand. The tabloids christened them ladettes – a term Ball disliked. “I wince when I hear that word: ‘ladette’,” Ball said in 2020. “Radio 1 saw a girl who was out living a bit of life and they were like we want you to go out and go to the parties and meet the bands and come in and tell us all those stories. I took that slightly too literally.”
Though Ball’s antics proved to be a good advert for the Radio 1 breakfast show, Ball has said that BBC executives started to become concerned that the boozing was taking its toll on her. “I remember turning up one day looking at the clock and trying to say, ‘It’s ten past seven’, and all the words came out in the wrong order,” she said. “something had to give. I know the bosses were a bit concerned about my health – and my mental health.”
Ball once said that of the 1990s: “I loved it at first. Hanging out with people who partied every day, woke at 5pm, had a few shots of vodka and a bag of chips, then went clubbing again.” When she was asked about what it was like helming the Radio 1 programme during that time, she replied: “I can’t really remember – it was the 1990s.”
A clarifying moment came in the aftermath of a boozy New Year’s Eve party in 2009. She told Grazia: “I sat sobbing, knowing if I didn’t stop I’d end up in a mental home. I called a therapist I’d been seeing and asked for help.” She has been candid about her struggles with alcohol, with stints on and off the wagon.
Ball was born in Blackpool and grew up in Buckinghamshire. The daughter of the kids’ TV presenter Johnny Ball, her parents split when she was two and she was raised by her father and his second wife, Diana. She did not see her mother from the age of five until she was in her late teens. “Dad was always really cool about me seeing mum if I wanted to,” she once said. “But although she sent birthday cards and presents, I never responded.”
The pair only reconciled when Ball received an invitation to her mother’s 40th birthday party. She told The Mirror in 1997: “I could hardly breathe. My heart started pounding like mad. I suddenly panicked: ‘What if we hate each other?’” Those fears were misplaced. “Mum hadn’t changed a bit, except she didn’t seem quite so tall. We spent such a lovely first day together… lots of crying and girly emotion.”
Never the most academic pupil, her school report read: “If Zoe Ball spent as much time on her work as she did in entertaining the rest of the class, she’d go far.” She then started an unusual degree in media studies, geology and computer science at City of London Polytechnic, but dropped out after four months.
Ball decided to follow her father into TV after being inspired by the likes of Sally James on Tiswas and No 73’s Andrea Arnold. After stints as a researcher and runner for production companies, Ball followed her father by launching her on-screen career in children’s broadcasting. Ball got her break on Playdays, before joining CBBC’s Smart in 1994, alongside Mark Speight and Jay Burridge, then the Saturday morning children’s magazine show Live & Kicking with Jamie Theakston.
Music was always her passion, however, and she managed to win a gig presenting Top of the Pops in 1996, where she alternated duties with Jo Whiley and Jayne Middlemiss. In 1997 she was named as Kevin Greening’s co-host of the Radio 1 breakfast show, and quickly took sole charge.
The same year that she joined Radio 1, she met Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, while the breakfast show was hosted live from Ibiza. His chat-up line was: “How would you like to not go to bed with me tonight?” They partied all night and she presented the programme without any sleep, later admitting that she was so high that she “could hardly speak”.
The pair got married in a lavish ceremony at Somerset’s Babbington House in 1999 (on the morning of the ceremony she was photographed clutching a bottle of whisky with a cigarette in her mouth) but separated four years later after Ball had an affair with Dan Peppe, a DJ and friend of Cook.
They got back together and seemed to be solid but split for good in 2016, a few months after she was photographed at a party kissing Tay Tay Starhz, the singer of the band Franklin Lake. Ball and Cook have two children together: Woody, 23, and Nelly, 14.
Ball’s father publicly claimed to understand why she had the affair with Peppe. “Woody was exactly the same age as Zoe was when her mother left,” he said. “She was thinking, ‘I’m like my mother, I’m going to let us all down.’ It was a cry for help.”
She began to shed the image of being a hard-living party animal when she came third in the 2005 series of Strictly Come Dancing (behind cricketer Darren Gough and hurdler Colin Jackson), and six years later she became presenter of the sister show It Takes Two. She was there for a decade.
“You go from this sort of ladette, this sort of boozy person who is always in trouble,” she said. “I went on Strictly and people did a double-take. I will always be grateful to that show.”
Her alcohol struggles remained in the background, and Ball has said that she was never one for moderation. “The problem was that if I opened a bottle of wine, I couldn’t have just one, or maybe two, glasses. I had the whole bottle,” she said. “It got to the point when it was easier not to drink anything at all.”
In recent weeks she appears to have had something of a rapprochement with Cook, who like his ex-wife has battled his demons. They cheered on Woody, a fledgling DJ, at a gig in Brighton during the summer and Cook is said to have been a “rock” for Ball amid her personal turmoil.
Though she is far less likely to trouble gossip columns or front pages these days, Ball’s stock has arguably never been higher.
However, the parties do not hold much of an appeal now. “I do the French exit now. I go early. Everyone sees you, and you get to see your friends. Then I do a ‘Woohoo’ and they don’t ever remember you weren’t there for a bit,” she said last year. “I am back in bed with some crumpets and watching Gardeners’ World by 10 most nights.” It seems unlikely that giving up the early starts will change that.
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