Estranged for 14 years, how Zoe Ball is now caring for the cancer stricken mum who walked out on her as a toddler
WHEN presenter Zoe Ball’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, she did what any loving daughter would do — worked out how she could restructure her own life to offer support.
In her case, that involved telling the bosses of her BBC Radio 2 breakfast show that there would be times where she would have to hand over the reins to someone else.
She then informed her fans on Instagram that her family was facing ‘tough times’, praising her ‘brave’ mother Julia, who is going through chemo, and thanking Gaby Roslin for agreeing to cover her.
‘I’m trying to be at work on breakfast as often as I can but occasionally need to be at home with my Mama. Thanks to Gaby for stepping in,’ she wrote.
Those whose family members have been through serious illness will understand her agony. However important (or public) the career, family will always come first. Zoe and her mum seem particularly close, enjoying holidays together, and when Zoe’s children Woody, 24, and Nelly, 14, were younger, she helped with childcare.
Physically, they share similarities too. Both have tall, rangy frames, elfin features and high cheekbones. While Julia never had the profile her famous daughter now has, she does know a little about being in the public eye. In the late ’60s, a life-sized cardboard cut-out of her was to be found in chemist shops, thanks to a modelling contract with Kodak.
Zoe and her mum were not always close, however. And a cardboard version of her mum, should any have still been on show in the early ’70s, would have been the closest the young Zoe got to see her.
For 14 years they were estranged, which makes Zoe’s sacrifice now all the more noteworthy. Zoe was just two when Julia, then 21, walked out on the family, leaving her dad, the children’s TV presenter Johnny Ball, to bring up their daughter.
FROM the age of five until her late teens, Zoe didn’t see her mum. Even when old enough to make the decision for herself, she declined to let her mother into her life.
‘I had always been a complete Daddy’s girl, so there was no question who I’d stay with,’ she once said in an interview, explaining that when her father remarried (when Zoe was six), his new wife Di brought Zoe up as her own. Two half-brothers followed.
‘Dad was always really cool about me seeing Mum if I wanted to,’ she said. ‘But although she sent birthday cards and presents, I never responded. Mum was around, and I knew she was there. But she had her life, and I had mine.’
Zoe has always said that she had a blissfully happy childhood. She refers to Di as ‘Mumly’, and has always credited her with being there for her.
Her true mother came back into her life when she was entering adulthood. The rapprochement came when Julia married for the third time. Her new husband, Rick, invited Zoe to Julia’s 40th birthday party. ‘Your mum would love to see you,’ he said.
Zoe agreed. But on the day of the party, she was so nervous she almost changed her mind. ‘I could hardly breathe,’ she recalled in an interview with the Mirror in 1997. ‘I felt faint but somehow managed to hold myself together.’ She wasn’t even sure which house belonged to her mum, but ‘I spied some balloons tied to a gate and my heart started pounding like mad. I suddenly panicked: “What if we hate each other?”’
It was her mum who answered the door – and all hesitation was gone. ‘Mum hadn’t changed a bit, except she didn’t seem quite so tall,’ Zoe recalled. The pair fell into each other’s arms. ‘We spent such a lovely first day together... lots of crying and girlie emotion.’
In the coming years, they would see each other all the time. Zoe once noted that if she needed any clarification of what she was doing, career-wise, she could consult her mum’s cuttings collection. Obviously proud, Julia collected all manner of articles about Zoe’s growing success.
She started to come to her mum for boyfriend advice too, especially when she was considering whether to exit a relationship in her early 20s. ‘She told me you know if something is right or not,’ Zoe said. Mind you, she also harboured hopes Zoe would become romantically involved with fellow presenter Jamie Theakston, who lived on the same road as Julia and Rick. Alas, she was disappointed there.
Were there long heartfelt conversations about what had happened when Zoe was just a toddler? There must have been because in 2002 Zoe told an interviewer for The Independent: ‘She was young, didn’t want to be a mum, so legged it. I can understand that.’
SHE also conceded her youthful refusal to see her mum might have been down to fear of being disappointed: ‘I had this fantasy about her being a brilliant person, which I don’t think I wanted to ruin by meeting her. I remembered her in a suede jacket with fur trim, and suede boots, terribly glamorous.’
In 1999, Zoe’s own life – then rather wild, she was characterised as a ‘ladette’ by newspapers — seemed to be settling down. She married DJ Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ Cook, and their firstborn Woody arrived the following year.
A difficult question arose: how do you behave as a mum yourself when the role model has been, quite literally, absent?
Zoe has admitted her own path through motherhood has not been easy, saying: ‘I didn’t like being pregnant... how it affected my lifestyle. I didn’t like being fat and then, in the first few months after childbirth, I couldn’t bear the lack of sleep.’
She also suffered post-natal depression, and had a period when she seemed set on bowing out of family life.
When Woody was two — the age Zoe was when her mum left — she ran off with DJ Dan Peppe. Norman said at the time: ‘If you love someone you’ll forgive them.’ Zoe kept in contact with Woody throughout, and within three months was back home.
Her father described Zoe’s affair as ‘a cry for help’, and she acknowledged sharing traits with her mother. ‘I had a history of being the kind of person who, the minute anything went wrong in my life, would run away,’ she once said.
Zoe and Norman split for good in 2016, and seven years ago her new partner, Billy Yates, took his own life after a battle with depression. She has since weathered the breakdown of a five-and-a-halfyear relationship with former construction worker Michael Reed.
Her mum Julia has, by all accounts, been a rock throughout. Zoe’s insistence on being there for her, now, is evidence that bridges have long since been mended.