There has never been any bad feeling between me and Zoe, but we drifted apart
Sara Cox talks to about family, her friendship with Zoe Ball and why she won’t be writing a book about her ‘ladette’ days UBBLY broadcaster Sara in time. It was a bubble that was
Cox settles down for a good really lovely while it was happening, old chinwag – the sort but just didn’t last. I was in London, which has endeared her to she was in Brighton. We just drifted, millions of radio listeners like friendships do. over the years. “But we always texted each other
The Bolton-born Radio 2 if we’d gone for the same job – and presenter – former party animal then I heard I’d not got it,” she says ‘ladette’ of the 90s, along with pal wryly. I once texted her from a
Zoe Ball – is instantly likeable, French Connection dressing room, quirky, funny and chatty, just as she half dressed, saying, ‘I’ve just got is on the radio. the call that I’ve not got the job but
Of course, Sara, 44, has long since you have, and if I’m going to lose ditched the ladette label for a more out to anybody, I’m glad it’s you’.” grown-up life with her family, and Between radio presenting, Sara her gentle, uplifting 5-7pm has found time to write her first Drivetime slot on the nation’s most book, Till The Cows Come Home – popular radio station. a gentle, poignant early
She’s refreshingly down to earth. autobiography in which she pays She shows me the texts that pinged homage to her childhood, largely to and fro between her and Zoe Ball growing up on her father’s cattle – charting mutual support, farm just outside Bolton, anxiety dreams and the like surrounded by dogs, cows, – when Chris Evans horses and lots of ‘cack’. announced he was leaving The seeds of chat were the Radio 2 Breakfast Show sown in her dad’s farm last year. kitchen, her nana’s front
Much has been made of room and her mum’s pub. Zoe getting the job when Her parents divorced
Sara had been the favourite when she was seven but to replace Evans, but it’s she insists she wasn’t clear there was absolutely affected, as she went on to no animosity between live with her mum and them. stepfather who lived only
“My head did get a tiny bit 10 minutes away from her father. turned, because I got so much fuss She intended the book to be a in the press. All my DJ friends were love letter to her father, Len, a going, ‘This is yours’, and I batted it character who is ‘the calm at the away. At my core, I never felt it was eye of the storm’, but it ended up a going to be mine,” she says now. homage to her mother, Jackie, the
“Now that I’ve got Drivetime, if strong 4ft 11in heroine who she both were on the table I’d go for describes as ‘opinionated, funny, Drivetime, because I’m not as loving and complicated, but always knackered, there’s not the pressure, there’. and it’s a lovely time of day because “Since having kids, things started you’re going home with people.” to become clearer about how hard
Sara admits she hasn’t seen much my mum must have worked, and of Zoe for a while. how it’s not easy being the ‘un-fun’
“There’s never been any bad parent, which I generally am now,” feeling there but we definitely Sara reflects. drifted. The thing about mine and She has three children, Lola
Zoe’s friendship was that it was Anne, now 14, from her first such a perfect tabloid story. marriage, and Isaac, 10 and
“It was definitely a really good eight-year-old Renee, with her friendship but it was also a moment advertising executive husband Ben
BCyzer. “I think it’s hard, because I’m parenting with a really good other parent,” she explains.
“Sometimes I think, ‘Can you just stop being such a good cop?’ I’m just naturally more of a bad cop.”
The book charts her childhood as she fussed over newborn calves, tumbled over hay bales in the barn, and doted on her beloved pony Gus at Grundy Fold Farm, a smallholding which her father still runs.
He was divorced with three young children when he met Sara’s mother, who was 19 – but she raised them as her own and went on to have Sara and her sister Yvonne.
Recalling her parents’ divorce, she says : “When you are the youngest, you are sheltered from the hullabaloo. We moved very close to the farm, so I was always only a few minutes’ walk away. When you are six or seven, you care about your hamster and your Sindy doll and playing out. Everything else kind of washes over you – I was well protected from it all.”
Sara recalls that her mother held down a lot of jobs for a long time to keep the wolf from the door, and ran a pub, which has made her appreciate her own lifestyle more.
“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 with food, rammed with tins,” she says with a smile. “We were never short of food but for me, security for my family comes in the form of having enough food in. I’m constantly making sure we don’t waste food.”
Sara began modelling when she was spotted, aged 18, with her sister, who was on a placement in Paris.
The work took her on assignments to Milan, South Korea and New York, as well as modelling for IT V’s This Morning, although you get the sense she felt a bit like a fish out of water in a world where looks are everything.
But when a casting came in for Channel 4’s The Girlie Show in
1996, she found her voice.
“I had an audience for my musings, one that was even chuckling at them,” she recalls. It launched her broadcasting career, which has since included stints on The Big Breakfast, a decade at Radio 1 and now Radio 2.
With three children, her world has shifted to grown-up broadcaster. “People who listened to me, grew up with me,” she reflects. “I definitely feel happier now.”
The book ends with her securing her job on The Girlie Show. Is there going to be a sequel? “No, I don’t think so, partly because I had such a good time in the Nineties that I can’t remember much of it, and the lawyers would be on it and I’d have no friends,” says Sara.
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