There’ s no bad feeling about losing the breakfast show to Zoe .. but we’ ve drifted apart
Radio 2 DJ reveals her friendship has withered as the years have passed
BROADCASTER Sara Cox, her cute Maltese terrier Beano in tow, settles down for a good old chinwag – the sort that has endeared her to millions of radio listeners over the years.
The Radio 2 presenter – former party animal of the 90s, along with pal Zoe Ball – is instantly likeable, quirky, funny and chatty, just as she is on the radio.
Of course, Sara, 44, has long since ditched the “ladette” label for a more grown-up life with her family, and her uplifting 5-7pm drive-time slot on the nation’s most popular radio station.
She’s happy to show the texts that pinged to and fro between her and Zoe when Chris Evans announced he was leaving the Radio 2 Breakfast Show last year.
Much was made of Zoe getting the job when Sara had been the favourite to replace Chris but the texts show zero animosity between them.
Sara said: “My head did get a tiny bit turned, because I got so much fuss in the press.
“All my DJ friends were going, ‘This is yours’, and I batted it away. At my core, I never felt it was going to be mine. Now I’ve got drive-time.
“If both were on the table, I’d go for drive-time because I’m not as knackered, there’s not the pressure, and it’s a lovely time of day because you’re going home with people.”
Sara admitted she hasn’t seen much of Zoe for a while. She said: “There’s never been any bad feeling there but we definitely drifted.
“The thing about mine and Zoe’s friendship was that it was such a perfect tabloid story.
“It was definitely a really good friendship but it was also a moment in time.
“Our then husbands were friends (DJs Fatboy Slim, aka Norman Cook, and Jon Carter), so the four of us would hang out and party.
“It was a bubble that was really lovely while it was happening but just didn’t last.
“I was in London, she was in Brighton. We just drifted, like friendships do. But we always texted each other if we’d gone for the same job – and then I heard I’d not got it,” she said wryly.
“I once texted her from a French Connection dressing room, half dressed, saying, ‘I’ve just got the call that I’ve not got the job but you have, and if I’m going to lose out to anybody, I’m glad it’s you’.”
Sara has found time to write her first book, Till The Cows Come Home, a gentle, poignant early autobiography in which she pays homage to her childhood, largely growing up on her father Len’s cattle farm outside Bolton, surrounded by dogs, cows, horses and lots of “cack”.
The seeds of chat were sown in the farm kitchen, her nana’s front room and her mum’s pub – her parents divorced when she was seven but she insists she wasn’t affected, as she went on to live with her mum and stepfather 10 minutes away from her dad.
She initially intended the book to be a love letter to her father but it ended up a homage to her mother, Jackie, the strong 4ft 11in heroine who she described as “opinionated, funny, loving and complicated, but always there”.
Sara said: “Since having kids, things started to become clearer about how hard my mum must have worked, and how it’s not easy being the ‘un-fun’ parent, which I generally am now.” She has three children, Lola Anne, 14, from her first marriage, and Isaac, 10, and eight-year-old Renee, with her advertising executive husband Ben Cyzer. The book charts her childhood as she fussed over newborn calves, tumbled over hay bales and doted on her beloved pony Gus at Grundy Fold Farm, a smallholding her father still runs. Sara’s mum held down a lot of jobs for a long time, and ran a pub, which has made her appreciate her own lifestyle more.
She said: “I can be tired and stressed but I’ve none of the worries or the pressure that my mum had.”
Those early days have made an impact on her own approach to work and lifestyle.
“My cupboards are fit to bursting, rammed with tins,” Sara said. “We were never short but for me, security comes in having enough food in.”
She began modelling when she was spotted at the age of 18 but with three children, her world has shifted to grown-up broadcaster.
“People who listen to me, grew up with me,” she said. “I feel happier now. It can be charted from the minute I clapped eyes on Ben.
“It’s not like he gave me a pipe and slippers to woo me. He’s a lot of fun, the funniest person I know, close second to me!”
Her book ends with her securing her job on Channel 4’s The Girlie Show in 1996. But there are no plans for a sequel.
She said: “I don’t think so, partly because I had such a good time in the 90s that I can’t remember much of it, and the lawyers would be on it and I’d have no friends.”
● Till The Cows Come Home by Sara Cox is published by Coronet tomorrow, priced £18.99.