Zoe’s most painful dilemma
She escaped her ladette past, divorce and her partner’s suicide for a bucolic idyll. So can she really give up her new-found peace for up to £1m a year as Chris Evans’s replacement on Britain’s biggest radio show?
ZOe BALL loves everything about her new life in the country, but her particular pride and joy is her garden. She has started growing her own vegetables — her corn on the cob has exceeded expectations — and is delighted with the profusion of purple wisteria on one of the walls of her 18th-century cottage.
The 47-year-old presenter and former hellraiser moved into the property in Ditchling, a picturesque village in east Sussex, in February. It is less than an hour’s drive from her former home on Hove’s Western esplanade, but a million miles away in atmosphere.
The iconic row of white-painted properties overlooking the sea at Hove has a decidedly glitzy feel to it and has been home to many famous names, including singers Sir paul McCartney and Adele and actor and comedian David Walliams.
Ditchling has its famous residents, too: singer Dame Vera Lynn, 101, and children’s author Raymond Briggs, 84, who penned The Snowman. But it’s a different vibe — as you might gather.
And it is precisely Ditchling’s out-of-theway position, and its old-world flavour, that attracted Zoe. She goes cycling in the lanes and for long walks on the South Downs. Last month, she started fitness classes in the village hall with the other local ladies.
She lives close to the church and, enchanted by the heavy, but restful, sound of the bells, has considered whether she might become a bell-ringer. And she hasn’t had a drink for more than two years.
But into this peaceful idyll in which Zoe has immersed herself of late, a giant grenade has been lobbed — she has reportedly been offered the BBC’s flagship Radio 2 Breakfast Show, replacing Chris evans, who announced his departure earlier this month to return to Virgin Radio.
A source told The Sun: ‘We are in advanced negotiations with Zoe to replace Chris,’ adding, however, that no contract has yet been signed.
It may well be with mixed feelings, say friends, that Zoe is considering whether to accept.
AT FIRST sight, it may not seem too much of a dilemma. The Radio 2 Breakfast Show, which acquired iconic status by the late Sir Terry Wogan’s epic tenure — from 1972 to 1984 and 1993 to 2009 — is the most prestigious prize in radio.
evans’s salary was £1.6 million so, even once you take into account the continuing row over pay at the BBC — and its habit of paying men more than women — it’s likely that Zoe will have been offered somewhere approaching £1 million.
But friends say while she accepts this is one of those golden opportunities that are almost impossible to turn down, Zoe is nervous.
Nervous that, back in the spotlight, with all the concomitant attention, she will be sucked back into habits of old.
Late nights, the lure of alcohol and unhealthy, chaotic living.
She was, after all, one of the original ladettes of the Nineties, that group of high-profile young women — including fellow presenters Sara Cox and Denise van Outen — who competed with one another to behave as badly as possible.
The idea, generally, was to act like a group of blokes out on a stag party — but pretty much every night of the year.
But Zoe’s done with all that. Furthermore, she has achieved a certain equilibrium in her life that hasn’t always been there before. She has her country idyll and can spend a lot of quality time with her 17-year-old son, Woody, and eightyear-old daughter, Nelly.
The Breakfast Show may be a big prize, but it is a gruelling one. To start work at 6.30am will mean a 4am rise for Zoe. She will be expected to be seen at events, to keep up with the news agenda.
‘Obviously, Zoe knows that this is a great offer and it’s likely she will take it,’ says the source.
‘But, at the moment, she has a nice balance in her life, which she likes. She is nervous about anything that will change that. She doesn’t want things to go back to how they were.’
Zoe has spent a lot of time in the past year or so evaluating what is and what isn’t important in her life. After separating from her husband, the DJ and musician Norman Cook, in 2016, Zoe began dating Billy Yates, a BBC cameraman who was a member of the Antiques Roadshow crew.
She was madly in love with him and believed they had a future together. When the 40-year-old took his life in May last year, she was completely devastated.
Just a few days ago, she wrote a note about Yates on her Instagram account. Wishing him a ‘Happy Birthday’, Zoe wrote: ‘Hope you can see the shimmers of love that burn ever strong for you, from the daft beings dotted all over this planet down here, who’ll love your face forever [and] miss you more than ever.’
The sudden loss of Billy, say friends, made Zoe re-evaluate her life. She had already begun to make changes, such as giving up alcohol — making a fresh start in Ditchling, and developing an appreciation of the simpler things in life, was a continuation of that process.
SpeAkINg about village life on her radio show earlier this year, it was clear she was charmed. ‘I don’t know if any of them are listening, but thank you to my new neighbours,’ she said. ‘I’ve just moved over the Downs a little bit into a lovely village and I have been inundated with cards and flowers from people, which is so lovely.
‘I have got a card from the vicar of Ditchling. I live right next to the church and the bells are amazing. Is it hard to be a bell-ringer? I know I have just taken up cycling, and maybe I should get through that first, but I was thinking it would be quite good fun to be a bell-ringer.’
Zoe also posted a note on her social media about country life: ‘Village life is sweet as. Thanks Mac Farm for the fresh eggs left on my doorstep. What an eggscellent surprise.’
Ball presents her Radio 2 show every Saturday afternoon and, over the past few weeks, she has also been preparing for another season hosting the Strictly Come Dancing spin-off It Takes Two, which airs on weeknights during the run of the main programme.
Since last December, Zoe has been seeing Michael Reed, a 47-year-old from Kent who runs a construction firm.
By all accounts, he’s a bit of a charmer. One ex-girlfriend is Lorraine Ashdown, a TV and radio presenter with whom he has a young daughter. ‘He certainly has a type and he also has a reputation,’ a friend of Lorraine’s reportedly told one newspaper.
Whatever doubts some may have about Michael Reed’s suitability, for now, at least, Zoe seems happy enough with him.
She likes to spend time with her family, including her mother, Julia, who split up from her father, former children’s TV presenter Johnny Ball, when Zoe was just two. Between the ages of seven and 18, Zoe lived with her father and saw little of her mother, but today, they have a close relationship.
If she takes over the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, the balance in her busy, but low-key, life will shift and she will be under constant scrutiny once more. ‘She has been giving careful thought to the offer,’ says Ben Douglas, a showbiz PR. ‘It’s not that she’s holding out for more money or anything like that. She simply wants to think things through and decide how this would fit in her life as it is now.’ If she does take the job, it will be exactly 20 years since Zoe became the first female sole host of the Radio 1 Breakfast Show in 1998. Before that, from 1996 to 1999, she co-hosted the Saturday morning children’s TV show Live & Kicking with Jamie Theakston. Back then, she was a party animal who boasted about her drunken antics. One of her closest friends was fellow DJ Sara Cox — who has also been named as a contender for the Breakfast Show gig.
And another close pal was none other than Chris Evans. They used to go out drinking together and even once enjoyed a drunken ‘snog’ in the back of a car.
In an interview in 2000, Zoe recalled a day out on the tiles with Evans. ‘I went home at about seven. I fell in the door and said: “I’ve got to be sick”, knelt down to throw up, then fell over, smashed my head on the sink and knocked myself out.
‘But I was fine. I kind of got dragged to bed and left for dead.’ However, in an interview the following year, Zoe suggested that the whole ‘ladette’ business began as a way to drum up publicity.
‘I thought that if I shocked enough people, they would sit up and take notice, but I think I just alienated people. I wouldn’t normally talk about crude things all the time. That’s not really me.
‘I think I was trying to create a new persona and I’ve come to realise that I wasn’t very comfortable doing it.’
So it seems the Zoe we see today — sober, with a thoughtful side, along with her appealing on-screen bonhomie — is the real Zoe.
Certainly, the wild days took their toll on her love life. In 2003, there was a serious wobble in her marriage when she had a fling with one of her husband’s close friends, DJ Dan Peppe.
Norman and Zoe were later reconciled and, after both giving up alcohol, conceived their longedfor second child, Nelly, who was born in 2010.
Then, in 2015, Zoe was photographed in a messy embrace with TayTay Starhz, a 22-year-old boyband member, at the wrap party for It Takes Two. Zoe, then 45, appeared, at a rather advanced age, to have entered a second ladette phase. The episode marked a turning point for her.
The following year, she and Cook split for good and she gave up alcohol once more.
She hasn’t looked back since. Earlier this year, she paid £970,000 for the cottage in Ditchling.
She enjoys ambling down the historic main street, where part of a house remains where Anne of Cleves lived in the 16th century after being dispatched to this little backwater by King Henry VIII when he divorced her.
FOR the past six months or so, she has enjoyed spending time at home, growing her vegetables — tomatoes, chard and sweetcorn — and nurturing her flowers.
You won’t find any wine or beer in her fridge — she has recently discovered the health benefits of juicing and has just returned from a ‘juice retreat’ in Portugal.
Yesterday, the BBC sought to play down rumours that Zoe has been offered the Radio 2 Breakfast Show.
‘We are considering and talking to a number of people,’ said a spokesman. ‘We haven’t made a decision and we’ll make an announcement when we have.’
But if Zoe does become the next presenter of the flagship BBC show, we can perhaps expect a return, after the high-octane, frenetic style of Evans, to the gentler, more homespun approach of his late, great predecessor, Terry Wogan.
There will be no boasting of drunken nights on the tiles.
Rather, listeners are more likely to hear Zoe extolling the benefits of country living.
How to produce a good corn on the cob, for example, or the soothing pleasure of breathing in the heady scent of wisteria on a sunny day.