How falling off the wagon led Zoe Ball into this kiss with a boy half her age
FOR a happily married, 45-year-old mother of two and well-known TV personality it was a real humiliation. A late-night post-party fumble with a 22-year-old in a nightclub, which Zoe Ball would have preferred to forget by daylight, ended up all over the newspapers.
The young man turned out to be a publicity-hungry boyband singer who couldn’t wait to tell all about their encounter.
In a description sure to try the patience of Zoe’s husband, club DJ Norman Cook, Tay Starhz revealed: ‘She very naturally leaned in for a kiss and was very confident . . . We used tongues and it was as if we’d been missing each other all day rather than we’d just met. She was touching me on my neck and back and was very sensual.’
Last night, Zoe, 45, showed great sangfroid in anchoring an hour-long special of the Strictly Come Dancing spin-off It Takes Two. Her sunny smile barely wavered — despite her tweet of the day before: ‘Ouch. ITT wrap party last night. Piecing together the crew’s drunken antics in Soho.’
They all adore her on It Takes Two, and rallied round her yesterday. She tweeted to thank a friend who remarked that a picture could tell ‘1,000 misleading stories’.
But Zoe has long had a reputation as a ‘party girl’ — one of the last ones standing in the bar at Elstree Studios, where they film the show — with a super-social personality.
A source said: ‘ Zoe flirts with everyone, even Bruno Tonioli and Craig Revel Horwood. We all love her for it.
‘These things happen at a party and there’s nothing so awful about it. Norm adores Zoe, and if she says there was nothing to it, that’s good enough for him.’
There is, though, a sense that this was bound to happen. Zoe fell off the wagon last year after five years of sobriety, following serious problems in her marriage.
It was ten years after she and Norman tied the knot, on the morning of New Year’s Day 2009, that she gave up alcohol after a party of ‘total carnage’.
And since resuming her love of a glass or two, she has resumed her partying ways.
SHE allows herself one night of alcoholic indulgence a month, she says, though it’s possible this rises in the Strictly season. At Elstree, she generally braves the infamous BBC white wine or enjoys a vodka. Her favourite drinking partners are BBC head of entertainment Katie Taylor and fellow presenter Claudia Winkleman.
At Blackpool last year, though, she stumbled out of a nightclub at 3am, winking and sticking her tongue out at photographers, plainly much the worse for wear.
For someone who had made a virtue of her sobriety, it was an unusual look.
At the time, her publicist told me: ‘There are no problems between her and Norm.’
Friends confirmed that he was fine about Zoe drinking — though he stays sober — provided she doesn’t touch alcohol at home.
But how mortifying this latest slip is for them all — not least their son Woody, who, at 15, will be well aware of the brouhaha.
For, at times, Zoe still plays the giddy media blonde.
Last year she tweeted her support for Right Flirt, a Facebook page for Brighton singles. It was explained that she was promoting it as a favour for a friend.
She also reinvented herself as a YouTube ‘vlogger’, making video blogs. But her Off-Air channel failed to rake in subscribers and a few months ago she quietly stopped making the videos.
That she is trying to be relevant to the new media generation speaks volumes about her desire to stay in the spotlight, though.
A friend says: ‘Zoe is the kind of person who needs to have stuff going on. There was a time when Norm would be away all the time DJ-ing across the globe, then just blow back into her life for a mad weekend of partying and be off again. That had to end.’
Zoe, the daughter of TV personality Johnny Ball, started out on CBBC and moved up though Live & Kicking and Top Of The Pops to host Radio 1’s breakfast show.
She fell hard for Norman, seven years her senior, and BBC bosses loved the idea of her being a ‘party girl’. They couple were married in 1999, with Zoe arriving at the wedding in a cowboy hat, swigging from a bottle of whisky.
Woody was born in December 2000 but Norm’s party- heavy lifestyle was a problem. In 2003 they separated temporarily.
It turned out that Zoe had fallen for DJ Dan Peppe. Norm was heartbroken and told everyone he just wanted his wife back. After a few weeks, she returned.
Later Zoe said her husband’s drinking was as much a part of the problem as her affair.
She tried making films, thinking a step back from TV would help their marriage, then struggled back into showbiz as a presenter of Soap Star Superstar.
Meanwhile, there were wake-up calls about the perils of party living. Zoe’s friend, DJ Kevin Greening, was found dead after taking drugs in 2008; and Mark Speight, another presenter pal, killed himself after the death of his girlfriend from a drug overdose.
So on New Year’s Day 2009 she decided the wild times had to end. ‘I sat sobbing, knowing that if I didn’t stop I’d be destroyed. I’d end up in a mental home.’
She saw a therapist daily to help her through the detox, and two months later Norm entered residential rehab to save himself and his marriage. As Zoe said: ‘The more sober I became, the bigger his problem seemed . . . we were fighting, screaming.’
Directly after he left rehab they went on holiday, and baby Nelly was conceived. Zoe has called her ‘my gift of sobriety’.
Norman now stays at home with the children during the Strictly season and has taken up running.
Zoe is also supported by her brother Jamie, who was instrumental in helping her to get sober. Her mother, recently widowed, has moved in two doors away and is much involved with the children, who also have a nanny.
So this little scandal is the last thing Zoe needs, having been at such pains to tell interviewers how she has finally grown up.
‘When you get to my age, you don’t want to stay out all night,’ she told Woman & Home magazine.
‘I love Saturday evenings at home in my pyjamas in front of the TV. And going for a walk on the beach with the kids, then having a roast on a Sunday.’
If only, she must be reflecting, she had stuck to those simple pleasures this week.