“Morning gorgeous people it’s me, Zo, the happy wanderer. I’ve wandered back. How was your Brat summer? Was it marvellous? We did that back in the nineties. It was called something different then. Bringing back memories.”
Monday morning, 6.30am and Zoe Ball has returned to Radio 2. Ball, the BBC’s highest paid female presenter (as the tabloids love to keep reminding us and, let’s face it, I’m doing just now) has been off the airwaves for the last six weeks.
On August 12, Breakfast Show listeners tuned in to hear Radio 2’s afternoon DJ Scott Mills instead of Ball. “You weren’t expecting me, were you?” he said to listeners. “You have not overslept … Do not panic. It’s early. You aren’t late for work.”
Mills and Owain Wyn Evans have been sitting in for Ball in the interim (with DJ Spoony also sitting in for Mills in the afternoon slot), but on Sunday night on social media Ball announced she’d be back at work the next morning.
There has been inevitable speculation around her absence which drew a line between it and the death of Ball’s mother earlier this year. But Ball has said nothing and it doesn’t seem like she’s going to, although she did reply to one listener’s cheeky question: “No, Gavin, I didn’t go to Turkey for new face and teeth”.
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I’m not sure anyone is paid enough to share their private life with the general public as a matter of course. Still, I guess Ball must be used to this by now. She’s been a tabloid target for the last 30 years on and off.
After she took over the show from Chris Evans at the start of 2019 there was undisguised glee in 2020 when the Rajar figures showed she had lost a million listeners. But four years on it remains the most listened to radio show in the UK.
Back in the 1990s when she was the poster girl for “ladette culture” - that misogynist label for young women then in the public eye - Ball was also regularly monstered. She missed a few shows back then too, mostly related to late nights.
It was a point she made herself on Monday morning. When listener Victoria welcomed her back, Ball said: “Scott’s done a great job of looking after you. Do you know, Victoria? He used to have to do my show in the nineties. Slightly different circumstances this time.”
Listening to Monday’s show, Ball seemed match fit from the off, asking for all the gossip she had missed in the weeks she’d been off (cue messages about engagements and weddings and tearful farewells to kids heading off to university).
And there was the inevitable Strictly talk - because it seems everyone on BBC radio seems under obligation to talk about Strictly. “Is it wrong to have a hashtag crush on Pete Wicks?” Ball asked. “But only when he’s doing a Pasodoble.”
Actually, there was a lot of TV talk on the show - not just Strictly. Everything from Live and Kicking to Dawson’s Creek got a mention (in the same link, actually; by Tuesday she had moved on to Bake Off). And it was all largely inconsequential which is exactly what Breakfast Show listeners want. Not everyone wants to start their days listening to politicians.
The only slightly serious note Ball sounded was when she sent out love to her fellow breakfast time presenters, 6 Music’s Lauren Laverne and Heart Radio’s Breakfast Show presenter and former “Live and Kicking and The Priory mate” Jamie Theakston, both of whom are currently being treated for cancer.
Real life is never far away from any of us. Welcome back Zoe.
On Sunday food critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner was Michael Berkeley’s guest on Radio 3’s now hour-long Private Passions (it’s even longer - 90 minutes - on BBC Sounds). Rayner revealed that if he gave bad reviews to a restaurant it was never the chef who got in touch to complain. It was usually the chef’s mum.
After the death of his parents, Rayner added, he and his sister scattered their ashes in a number of different locations including the Ivy restaurant and inside milk churns that were part of the set of the West End production of Fiddler on the Roof.
“We like to think that those milk churns went into some prop store and my old folks’ remains keep coming out for ropey old productions of Oklahoma and Our Town and things like that.”
Listen Out For:
Open Country, Radio 4, Thursday, October 3, 3pm In the last of the current series Helen Mark visits the “Debatable Lands” between Carlisle and Gretna and tells the story of the Border Reivers.
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