BBC presenter Zoe Ball has officially stepped back from presenting Radio 2’s breakfast show after six years.
The 53-year-old told listeners last month that she had “decided it's time to step away from the early alarm call and start a new chapter.”
Ball has presented The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show every weekday morning from 6.30am since 2019. “Everything’s going to go wrong because I can’t see the buttons through my giddy tears,” she said today in an emotional sendoff. “You’re just there and I’m just here, having a chat with a mate. It’s such a special and intimate relationship.”
She continued: “It’s been such a gift to do the show, to follow in the footsteps of Terry [Wogan] and Steve [Wright] and others. It’s been a privilege to be the first [woman] to present the show...remember girls, you can do anything.”
Fellow Radio 2 presenter Scott Mills will replace her. "She's done an incredible job on this show over the past six years, and I am beyond excited to be handed the baton," said Mills in November.
Ball’s career at the BBC spans over 30 years and has had many twists and turns. In the 90s she was labelled a “ladette” and a party girl, while nowadays she prefers being “in bed with some crumpets and watching Gardeners' World by 10.” From being photographed on wild nights out and presenting a radio show on no sleep while “still high” in Ibiza, Ball has become the highest-paid female presenter at the BBC.
Her personal life has been marked by tragedy, though, and she says she will be leaving her show to “focus on family”.
Ladettes on tour
In the mid nineties Ball presented various TV shows for the BBC, including the children’s art show SMart on CBBC, and Top of the Pops. In 1997 she joined the Radio 1 breakfast show and the following year became the first woman to host the show solo. While Ball initially saw herself as “shy, gawky and awkward,” her predilection for drunken nights out and partying until the early hours earned her the title of “ladette” in the press.
Ladette is thought to have been coined by men’s magazine FHM in 1994 and describes a boisterous, heavy drinking, life-and-soul party girl. Ball was often photographed stumbling out of clubs and into taxis with fellow presenter Sara Cox, who was also labelled a ladette but says she “always hated” the term.
"Ladette is a word that makes my toes curl now," Cox told This Morning. Nevertheless, Radio 1’s producers were happy for Ball to embrace the attention. “I started trying to live up to the label,” she told Grazia. “I loved it at first. Hanging out with people who partied every day, woke at 5pm, had a few shots of vodka and a bag of chips, then went clubbing again.”
Cook and Ball
Ball met her future husband Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, in 1998 while hosting the BBC breakfast show in Ibiza. Remembering their first encounter, Ball said: “We bumped into Norman and he said: ‘How would you like to not go to bed with me tonight?’, meaning let’s go out all night. So we went into every club in Ibiza and I did the Breakfast Show the next morning on no sleep. But what a night!”.
The next morning she had to present her radio show on no sleep, while still buzzing from the evening’s antics. “As the show finished and my high from the night before started to fade, I looked around at the Radio 1 people and thought: ‘I might get the sack,’” she said.
Despite the fact that she could “hardly speak,” Ball kept her job and continued to work hard and play hard alongside her new husband whom she married in 1999. However, BBC bosses became increasingly concerned with her mental health.
Recalling that period, Ball told a BBC 2 documentary: “I remember turning up one day looking at the clock and trying to say it’s ten past seven – and all the words came out in the wrong order.” In March 2000 Ball shocked everyone by quitting the Radio 1 Breakfast show. "There is such a thing as too much fun," she told fans. Later that year the couple welcomed their first child, Woody.
Finding sobriety
Parenthood did not quell Ball and Cook’s taste for the party scene. Their marriage survived an affair Ball had with a little-known radio DJ in 2003, but Ball’s burning of the candle at both ends caught up with her after she hosted a New Year’s Eve bash in 2009, which left her home in a “wreck”.
“I sat sobbing, knowing if I didn’t stop I’d end up in a mental home. I called a therapist I’d been seeing and asked for help,” she told Grazia. Both she and Cook sought professional help for alcoholism and got sober. That year, their second child, Nelly, was born.
Ball has described her daughter as “my gift of sobriety”. The couple had many happy years together, and Cook said that Ball kept him on the straight and narrow. “She knew the fame game and we would sort of check each other,” he said on the Changes podcast. “If I wasn't respectful to people, she'd go: ''Oi, come on, that's not how we behave! Go back and thank them for that.''' The couple split amicably in 2016, in which time Ball struggled with sobriety.
Breaking the cycle
That year, Ball went to rehab and has been sober ever since. She began a relationship with Billy Yates, a BBC cameraman. Yates suffered from alcoholism and depression and tragically killed himself in 2017. This led Ball to embark on a 350-mile cycle ride for Sport Relief, raising over one million pounds.
Her choice to cycle across the country was a poignant reminder of her last moments with Yates. “He got on his bike and he cycled off and he turned round and he blew me a kiss goodbye, and that was the last time I saw him,” she said on the BBC documentary Zoe Ball’s Hardest Way Home in 2018. “It was just that moment and that feeling of ‘Oh my God I love him so much, we'll find some help and it will all be okay.’ And I wish I'd told him that.”
In January 2019 Ball replaced Chris Evans as the host of The Radio 2 Breakfast show. With an audience of around 6.3 million it is the most listened to breakfast show in the country. Ball was paid around £950,000 in 2023/24, making her the BBC’s second highest paid presenter, behind Gary Lineker.
Ball's last show was Friday 20 December. “I’ll see you in the Spring here on Radio 2, popping up to share new adventures. It’s been very special, take care of yourselves. Love you my peeps, my top cats,” she announced before playing her final song, Münchener Freiheit’s 1988 track “Keeping the Dream Alive”.
In November, after announcing her departure, Ball was photographed hugging her successor Scott Mills outside the BBC building, and said she was “really chuffed for my mate”.
