Johnny Ball on Playschool: ‘I dropkicked Humpty through the round window'

Telegraph

13-03-2025

'Last night, somebody in the pub told me I'd changed their life.'
Apparently this sort of thing happens to Johnny Ball frequently, but perhaps it's no surprise. For three decades, the presenter was one of the most recognisable faces on children's TV, charming toddlers on Play School, and then breaking new boundaries by bringing maths and science to a wide audience on shows such as Think of a Number and Think Again.
But as his new memoir My Previous Life In Comedy explains, it could have all been very different. Ball was a stand-up comedian for 17 years, before finding his niche in the nation's living rooms.
Ball tells me he inherited his sense of humour from his dad. 'He was a comic, but he never had a chance in life, he never even had a car. I couldn't think of any better career than making people happy, which in a way is what I've always done.'
Chatty and energetic, Ball, 86, welcomes me into the cheerful sitting room of his large Buckinghamshire home of 46 years, where his wife Di is sitting in on the conversation just in case he says something he shouldn't. 'We call her the manager,' he quips. Two dogs tumble about, while photos of his family – three children (including, of course, presenter Zoe Ball) and six grandchildren – line every surface.
Despite a lack of money, Ball says his childhood was happy. He was an academically engaged child, pouring over encyclopaedias and, unsurprisingly, a whizz at maths (although he only got 2 O-levels), before joining De Havilland Aircraft Corporation where he shone in accounts and then spent three years in the RAF as a radar operator. Following a stint as a Red Coat at Butlins in Pwllheli, he tried to launch a career in comedy.
'I was very shy. So, for my opening, I used to come on shaking a paper bag – 'bag of nerves' – and it always got a laugh,' he says. He was invited to appear on the BBC talent show Opportunity Knocks several times, but always turned it down. So instead he toiled away in a world of sticky-floored clubs, watching the likes of Bob Monkhouse ('The best technician in the world') and Frankie Howerd, learning the tricks of comedy. He also compered shows by the Rolling Stones and Dusty Springfield ('Fabulous, a tomboy'), and worked at big venues of the day including the City Varieties in Leeds. 'A sh–thole,' he mouths.
Indeed his was a Zelig-like existence saw him rub shoulders over the years with stars including Matt Monro, John Profumo, Val Doonican, Bud Flanagan, Muhammed Ali, the Duke Of Edinburgh ('I told him I had a crush on his wife'), Scott Walker and Freddie Starr. Starr, he says, was 'anti-social but sheer genius. He was trying to get Brian Epstein to sign him, but he didn't want to know. Two years later I gave him my agent's number – and bang!'
Ball himself, however, still wasn't getting the breaks. Was it bad timing, bad luck or bad agents? 'I always blame the agents,' he says. 'I always ended up at loggerheads with them. It's a very up and down life.'
And then, in 1967, he was offered a job on the relatively new Play School at the BBC. 'At first, I didn't take to it. They said, 'You're brilliant but when you're doing something you think is beneath you, you're terrible. So do you want this or not?' The money wasn't great but was keeping me out of the rougher clubs.'
And what about those toys – Big Ted, Little Ted, Humpty, et al? 'We were never irreverent on screen, but as soon as it was a wrap I'd dropkick Humpty through the round window.'
He was also writing and starring in other BBC Children's shows such as Cabbages And Kings and Play Away, but off-screen, life was tricky. Ball had married Julie Anderson, nine years his junior, and in 1970 they had Zoe. But he was travelling all over the place for work and cracks were beginning to appear in the relationship. While doing a summer season in Blackpool in 1973, a fortune teller told him there were two women in his life. He rubbished it then, 45 minutes later, met Di.
'Then I went home, and my wife told me she was leaving me,' he says. 'But the marriage was totally dead in the water anyway. I was really half a person. It was a clean break, there was no animosity. But I'd met Di and I knew she was very special.'
At this point in the mid 1970s, Ball had to endure both personal and professional upheaval. He called time on his stand-up career and started to think big. 'I didn't enjoy being in other people's shows, I wanted my own.'
Did he think he'd failed? 'No, I feel circumstances failed me. I got the mucky end of the stick. And then I had to think again. So I started writing…' Then came the big successes: Think Of A Number, Johnny Ball Reveals All and Knowhow, each demystifying maths and science with Ball's warmth and slight zaniness offsetting the sometimes complex subject matter.
His own children – broadcaster and presenter Zoe, Nick, who works in the arts, and Dan, a structural engineer – were no great shakes at maths. Regardless, Zoe became one of Britain's (and the BBC's) highest-paid stars, which he says he could never have predicted.
As her career began to flourish, he explains that: 'People started saying things like, 'Isn't your Zoe lovely?', and it seemed to be more marked than just casual. She's a great broadcaster, and the girl is still going full tilt.'
He doesn't agree with what's happened to children's TV, now a fragmented digital force, and victim of horrific budgetary cuts, although a cough from Di shuts down any expansion on that. Despite the BBC's denuded children's coverage, he says that the Corporation still has a place in his heart.
'It's worth its weight in gold,' he says. 'It's a stabilising influence on society. I've got so much trust and faith in the BBC, and it's got to be supported.'
Ball has found himself at the heart of several controversies. There was the knotty incident in Strictly Come Dancing in 2012 when his professional partner Aliona Vilani withdrew after an injury which, in a subsequent interview, Ball said was faked which Vilani then denied. Now, Ball will only say that he shouldn't have left the show when he did. At around the same time, he was also accused in some quarters of climate change denial after questioning the theory of man-made climate change. He later said that he had been turned into a 'global-warming heretic'.
Today Ball seems, if not exactly mellow, then contented. 'When you're happy within yourself, then you're capable of anything,' he says. 'But you've got to strive to get it right, because when you do, you can't imagine what it was ever like being wrong.'