Until we see women on the air as ‘ordinary’, it’s no surprise there are so many misogynistic complaints about Zoe Ball

The problem Ball has isn’t that some people preferred Chris Evans, but that many people really don’t like a woman’s voice driving a show, or a woman being in charge

Radio Two has lost a million listeners since Zoe Ball took over from Chris Evans on The Breakfast Show.

Radio Two is a big part of my listening life. Nothing against Zoe Ball, but Evan’s energy at that time in the morning is right up my street, so I followed him to Virgin. (I’d also follow Sara Cox if she left. Her show feels like your funny mate jumping into your car and joining you on a road trip. This was when I was a touring comedian... nowadays she joins me in the kitchen as I’m pottering about, wondering where my career went.)

Whatever your broadcaster tastes, it can’t be denied that Evans is endlessly excited by life and always rummaging around to find new thoughts and ideas to share with listeners. I’ve been a guest on his radio shows a couple of times and the last time, when the mics went off, he gave me the biggest piece of truffle I have ever seen, which he inexplicably had about his person. My point is, Chris Evans left huge shoes to fill and it was always going to take time for whoever replaced him to find their groove, and their audience.

However, reading responses on social media to the news that Ball’s listeners have dropped in serious numbers has almost made me want to bury myself in a women’s commune in Utah. The endless streams of tweets and commenting along the lines of “She got the job because of political correctness”, or “Zoe Ball, Sara Cox, Holly Willoughby, Kay Burley, Naga Munchetty... can’t stand any of them” make me think that the problem Ball has isn’t that some people preferred Chris Evans, but that many people really don’t like a woman’s voice driving a show, or a woman being in charge. Their take on the world is “boring”, and their voices are “shrill”. (Margaret Thatcher had elocution lessons to deepen her voice, so aware was she of this attitude.)

The comments aren’t a surprise, but they are not all from men.

We women inhabit the same world, where male voices in charge has been the norm for so long, and we can be just as dismissive of one another. Although in writing, broadcasting and presenting, there are many more women at the helm, it is still not ordinary. When we become “ordinary”, we won’t be endlessly compared to one another, and when we mess up, hit a snag, it won’t be because we are women.

Some of the worst comments I’ve heard denigrating female comedians have been from other women. I have been enthusiastically informed more times than I care to remember by giddy female audience members in bars after shows that “You were really good and I don’t usually find women funny!”

I would ask these women, “Are any of your female friends funny?” and they would list a gaggle of their girl pals who make them laugh, but only privately, when they are alone, away from men. Somehow that is where women’s humour and personality is allowed to exist. Put them boldly on a stage, behind a microphone, and their gender will be the umbrella that casts a shadow over them.

My brother unearthed a video of us when in our first year of university, home for the holidays. In the video, my brother and his friend are clowning around in front of the camera, and I see myself trying to join in. I’m ignored, and for the rest of it I’m sat on a sofa just watching them. The utter confidence they had that they were being funny, taking the limelight, was exactly as it was at university: the boys expressed their opinions with such certitude and girls tiptoed into discussions politely, sometimes apologetically, often with much more considered and informed responses. It took me such a long time to undo a lot of conditioning which told me I shouldn’t be up there. It’s hard, but it is undoable.

Things have changed a lot. The comedy scene is almost unrecognisable from what it was in the Nineties. Now female comedians are much more ordinary. A young female comedian I know and admire very much told me that she only listened to podcasts by women and surrounded herself with women’s voices to undo some of our conditioning that makes us gravitate towards a man’s point of view. I had a male live-in nanny for a couple of years who was a bookworm and was spending a year only reading books by women. Both these people are much younger than me and admittedly I inwardly rolled my eyes at their “wokeness”, but then realised they are ahead of me and I’d better catch up. They made me realise just how much more I consume men’s artistic endeavours than I do women’s.

I hate the term “mansplaining”. It’s an unhelpful term that is often misused to batter any man offering his opinion. But still we respect a man’s voice more instinctively than we do a woman’s and if, for a while, we deliberately let in and elevate only female voices, it’s not “political correctness” – it’s a step towards redressing a balance, fighting to make a woman’s voice “ordinary”.

The next time we rush to dismiss Zoe Ball, or any other woman counterpart, as “inferior”, we ought to take a long look at ourselves in the mirror first.