From high living to heartbreak – why original Nineties ladette Zoe Ball said enough

As a young woman, she was seen as the original ladette and went on to hold down some of the most high-profile roles in TV and radio. Now that Ball is stepping down from her Radio 2 role, Zoë Beaty charts three decades of highs and lows and what may come next

It truly has been such a privilege to share the mornings with you,” Zoe Ball told BBC Radio 2 listeners on Tuesday morning. After six years, she announced that she’d be stepping away from her role as presenter of the station’s breakfast show at the end of the year. Days before her 55th birthday celebrations this weekend, Ball feels it’s time to “focus on family”, she explained – this is the beginning of a “new chapter”.

For her legions of listeners, though, it’ll mark the end of an era.

Ball’s career and presence in British pop media spans more than three decades, and many incarnations. She was the first ever female presenter to host BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 breakfast shows; eventually growing a cohort of 6.3 million listeners on her prestigious Radio 2 slot. Ball has presented almost every prime TV show going, from Top of the Pops to the Brit Awards to Children in Need and Strictly Come Dancing.

And despite turbulence behind the scenes, her high energy, full-throttle approach to life has rarely dimmed and was there from the off. She first bowled into showbiz in the mid-Nineties, as presenter of Saturday morning kid’s TV show Live & Kicking alongside Jamie Theakston. She was also an occasional presenter of Channel 4’s somewhat chaotic The Big Breakfast show.

Ball was boisterous, unapologetic and outspoken. Before long, she – as well as fellow Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox – became the face of Nineties “ladette” culture: a movement loved by women given the permission to have as much fun as the men and a gift for the tabloid press.

Ball – daughter of famous TV children’s presenter Johnny Ball – was the party girl who set the ladette era soaring. Women in the public eye had long been expected to be feminine, polite, to behave – and, while Ball wasn’t really doing anything out of the ordinary for a woman in her late twenties, she just didn’t conform. Definitive pictures of the age were of her proudly holding up pints, drinking mini bottles of bubbly with a straw, smiling, and smoking cigarettes.

“Yes, they were ladettes, and they did represent that kind of hard-partying culture,” says Julian Linley, a former editor of Heat magazine, adding “but they were also just sweet girls. I guess the thing that gets missed a little bit with that ‘ladette’ narrative ... is that Zoe and Sara were just really good mates – they had a traditional, loyal friendship. They just went out partying, and they were a lot of fun to be around.”

Ball celebrates becoming the first female DJ to present the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show solo, in 1998 (PA)

He remembers how Ball turned up to one interview a bit late, probably hungover and very apologetic. “There was no sense of, ‘the star is in the room’,” he says. “It was just like being with mates. Which is what she makes you feel when you listen to her on the radio. There’s a real warmth to her; you feel safe around her.”

In an interview with Grazia magazine a few years ago, Ball said that she’d loved life at the time – though she has consistently said that she hates the term ladette itself. “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. It was quite a time,” she said, noting that once she was so high in Ibiza that she had trouble speaking while hosting the live broadcast. Twice she was warned by the BBC for swearing on air. “It was the Nineties,” she added. “It was wild, it was wild.”

Of course, the party has to end sometime. In 1997, she bagged a co-hosting gig on Radio 1 Breakfast alongside Kevin Greening; by 1998 she became the first female DJ to do it solo. It was there that Cox introduced Ball to Norman Cook, also known as DJ Fatboy Slim, who was taking the big beat genre to its peak. “Sara said to me: ‘You’re going to love Norman Cook when you meet him’,” Ball explained during her appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. “I just thought he was wild and free and fun and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

With Norman Cook at The Curzon Mayfair in 2015, a year before they split (Getty)

The pair married in August 1999, when Ball was 29 years old, at Babington House in Somerset. They had their son, Woody, the following year. It was a rocky start: they briefly split in 2003 when Ball confessed she was having an affair with DJ Dan Peppe, a close friend of Cook’s. Ultimately, though, they reconciled, having another daughter, Nellie, in 2010. Throughout their years together until their separation in 2016, both have credited the other with helping them stay grounded in spite of their fame.

“While you’ve got licence to break rules, you’ve always got a lot of people who’ll let you get away with murder,” Cook told the Changes podcast. “Zoe was really good for me for that, because she knew the fame game and we would sort of check each other.”

Ball was facing her own challenges too. Struggles with alcohol had begun to emerge and she recognised a reliance on drink was hampering her life. It took her “a couple of attempts to sort that out”, she later confessed, but through rehab and support from friends and family, she was finally able to take back control. Sobriety makes her feel “brave”, she told one interviewer.

The DJ during a 2003 broadcast from the Levi’s store in London’s Regent Street (PA)

Her honesty and courage have been consistently praised over the years, never so much as in 2017 when her then partner, cameraman Billy Yates, took his own life. Ball was left “in shock for two years” following his sudden and untimely death and was forced to take a break from presenting her Saturday afternoon Radio 2 show.

“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 explained in the 2018 BBC documentary Zoe Ball’s Hardest Way Home. Her emotional interview and determination to raise awareness of suicide prevention won her the respect of the nation.

Shortly after Yates’s death, Ball began a relationship with fashion model and carpenter Michael Reed that ended in 2023 – since then, she’s been through more tragedy, losing her mum, Julie Peckham, to pancreatic cancer earlier this year.

Many are now speculating about the timing of Ball’s resignation from the show, in light of this significant loss. Ball had taken time off earlier in the year to prioritise her mum’s ill-health and following her death, was off work for several weeks. Quite shockingly, fans on social media attacked her extended bereavement leave while receiving a £950,000 salary as the BBC’s second-highest-paid member of staff.

The radio DJ pictured with her engagement ring after Fatboy Slim’s proposal (PA)

The fact is though, grief is not soothed by a big salary. And Ball had been close to her mum, though their early family life wasn’t easy. On Desert Island Discs, she spoke about the difficulty of not seeing her mother for many years after her parents split when Ball was just a toddler. Ball, who was born in Blackpool but grew up in Farnham Common, Bucks, lived with her father and was “very loved and supported”, she said. But separation made her “question a lot of stuff as a kid”.

After a tough final year at the helm of BBC Radio, Ball’s final breakfast show will air on 20 December, when Scott Mills takes over – but, she says, she’s “not stepping away entirely”, adding “I’ll still be a part of the Radio 2 family, with more news in the new year.”

She’ll also be making her regular appearances on Channel 4’s Celebrity Gogglebox. In the meantime, Ball says she’s excited to be a “mum in the mornings, and I can’t wait to tune in on the school run!”, despite her youngest child, Nellie, now being 14.

It’s clear that, for Ball, this is an age of transition. In the years she’s been climbing to the very top of her game, she’s packed in an awful lot. Now it seems, it’s time to reassess and take stock for what her next chapter could look like.

No doubt she’ll be missed – but just as she redefined what it was to be a young woman starting out, there is no doubt that she will switch up expectations of what can come next for a woman in midlife. Watch this space.