Radio 2’s Sara Cox: ‘It’s lovely that Steve Wright is in my new novel’
Broadcaster Sara Cox felt a wave of emotion when recording a particular passage of the audiobook of her second novel, Way Back, in which a car radio is playing Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs.
“It was a bit of an emotional ambush when I got to the Steve Wright’s Love Songs bit,” said the Radio 2 Teatime presenter, who had featured a nod to her muchloved colleague, who died in February, in the book.
“But obviously I will never change it. It’s lovely that’s it’s in there. It was really nice that he’s in there.”
Fellow presenter Jeremy Vine also features in a cameo radio chat during a car journey in the same book. She tried comically to emulate his voice in the audio book. “I listen to Jeremy every day and he’s a good mate as well and I thought it (the accent) would be easy, but it’s impossible.”
It’s clear her Radio
2 family mean a lot to her, as she shows in the acknowledgements.
“When I occasionally arrive at the studio, pale and subdued after a solitary morning wrestling with words, your hilarious input and funny tales never fail to put a whacking big smile on my face,” she writes.
Her personality also seeps into Way Back, which centres on a working-class northern woman, Josie, who has lived a largely middle-class life in a leafy part of north London with her wealthy, charming husband, James, who spouts snobbish stereotypes about the North, which she used to find funny.
After 23 years, their marriage has come to its natural end, they both agree. Even their daughter Chloe is fine about it.
Juggling family – Sara has three children, Lola, 19, from her first marriage, and Isaac, 16, and 14-year-old Renee with her advertising executive husband, Ben Cyzer – and work, including her Teatime Radio 2 show, another series of the BBC2 book show Between The Covers, returning in October, horse-riding and a third novel on the cards, it’s a wonder she fits it all in.
Way Back by Sara Cox, priced £16.99. Available now