From ‘ladette’ to the highest-paid woman at the BBC, the nation’s cheerer-upper talks about her long and colourful journey to the top of radio
The other day Zoë Ball’s 20-year-old son, Woody, from her marriage to Norman Cook (aka Fatboy Slim), was home from university and rummaging through his mum’s house. “He found some stuff in my office,” says Ball, “and he was like, ‘Oh my God, you and Dad were, like, a big thing back in the day.” We are sitting in an empty restaurant near BBC Broadcasting House in London, and Ball’s eyes are a mixture of amusement and horror as she recalls her son’s discovery. She speaks in a surprisingly hushed manner given that there is nobody else in the room. “There was a time when I found looking back to the 90s a little bit… tricky,” she says, with a diplomatic tone.
When her kids (Ball and Cook also have a daughter, Nelly, 11) ask about it, she isn’t entirely keen to reminisce, although she recently turned 50 and appreciates having such distance from her wilder youth. “Woody says, ‘You had so much fun! Tell the story about this,’ and we groan and say, ‘Ugh you don’t want to hear about that.’ And he says, ‘I do, I want to hear the story.’ So our kind-of extended family tell him the tales. My friends say, ‘Let me tell you about the time your mother was…’” she tries to think of something printable to say. “‘On roller skates.’ Whatever.” She also sometimes finds old photographs and wails: “‘God I was so thin!’ I look back and I was dangerously gaunt. Not that that’s good – that’s not good. But we didn’t stop.”
