Zoe Ball joins forces with family for brand-new 'fascinating' series
Radio 2 star Zoe Ball could be fronting a brand-new factual series with a few of her family members in the near future
BBC Radio 2 star Zoe Ball has been eyeing up a new role with a few of her family members for a brand-new 'fascinating and revealing' programme. Broadcaster and presenter Zoe, 54, has previously appeared on Celebrity Gogglebox with her DJ son Woody Cook, so working with family isn't new to her.
And now, it has been announced that Zoe and her son Woody will hopefully be joining her presenter father, Johnny Ball, on his new factual series about mathematics. The new show will be exploring the "history of maths" and will be based on the first six chapters of his book, Wonders Beyond Numbers.
Speaking to The Sun, Johnny - who is hoping to convince TV bosses to commission the series - explained: "The material can be honed down to the essentials, so that anyone could present it in a light and transparent way.
'This is why I believe myself, Zoe and my grandson Woody could add all what each age group requires to make it a fascinating and revealing series.'
Meanwhile, in early May, Zoe returned to radio just five months after quitting her beloved show.
The radio DJ left her much-loved breakfast show last year, with her pal Scott Mills taking over, leaving her fans devastated by the shock departure.
She had fronted her show for six years, but admitted it was time to "start a new chapter". Her decision came just months after her extended absence from the BBC during the summer following her mother's death.
After bursting into tears on her final show, she made a comeback in the first week of May. Zoe returned with a bang on her new afternoon show as she played a few of her favourite songs and talked to the listeners.
Introducing her new segment, she said: "Hello it's me, oh it's lovely to be back on a Saturday.
"This is where it all began for me back when I used to sweep up and make the teas." One viewer was delighted with her return an wrote to her: "Great to have you back, Saturday afternoon is much better than having to wake up early."
The radio presenter read a few messages from fans and said: "It is lovely to be here, thanks for all your messages."
The BBC previously teased on their website that Zoe's new show will feature "the best songs and chat for a Saturday".
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BBC News
an hour ago
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Adam Curtis takes us into a world gone Shifty
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'One of the few moments of honesty' One section details the rise of the musical remixes in the 1980s, and its societal implications – how, in Curtis's words, "we are trapped by a cascade of endlessly replayed images, songs, dreams from the past".However, he admits, "that's the way this series was made, so I'm just as bad. If it's become a prison, I may be one of the jailers."One way Curtis remixes the past is by reusing an interview with Sir Alan Budd that Curtis filmed for the 1992 documentary Pandora's a remarkably honest interview, the one-time chief economic adviser to the Treasury during Thatcher's tenure worries that "the people making the policy decisions… never believed for a moment this was the correct way to bring down inflation."They did, however, see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working class.""I've always been fascinated by that interview that Budd gave," says Curtis. "It's one of the few moments of honesty I've ever had from someone in power like that being interviewed." 'A past that was about to go' As a young BBC employee, Curtis worked on That's Life. The show combined consumer affairs with lighter stories – most famously, a dog that could 'say' the word credits his ability to juggle tragic and comic tones to this early role: "It showed me that you could go from a badly-built housing estate built on poisonous waste ground to a talking dog."In Shifty, clips of societal unrest exist alongside Bruno, a dog who is, according to his vet, "changing his sex" – their male organs disappearing and their female ones says that it was Bruno's owner that drew him to the clip: "The way she's sitting and her hair," he says, "it felt like a past that was about to go."Animals in his work can often represent our secret lives, he says – "they are these creatures who live with us who probably have a lot of hidden knowledge about us."For Curtis, animals also counterpoint what he calls the "highly pretentious" elements of his work: "They just entertain people." 'A tragic figure' In this clip, an archivist at Cambridge University takes one of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's handbags out of a box, noting how the bag still smells strongly of her Thatcher's presence can be felt in much of the series, as we see the effects of her policies in the 1980s and 90s. Before Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Curtis argues there was "a collective model of society, where people came together in factories, were exploited, then realised they had power as a collective group."He feels, however, that the closure of industries like mining led to "a society full of fragmented individuals who were powerful in the way they thought about their own desires, but actually on their own were powerless."Despite this, Curtis sees Thatcher as a "tragic figure", who unleashed forces she could not control."She was the last politician who had an idea of how to change the country," he explains. "She wanted to create a society in which politics doesn't have as much effect as it did, and should allow individuals to be loose and free." 'Ever more irrational assumptions' Another recurring character in Shifty is scientist Stephen Hawking, whose theories about multiple universes destabilised how we think about putting together the series, Curtis began to think of Hawking in parallel to Thatcher, he explains."She believed that rationality applied through money would regenerate the country. He believed that the rational power of mathematics will lead you to a unified theory that will explain the whole world."What fascinated Curtis about Hawking was how his seemingly rational theories led him to "ever more irrational assumptions"."When he says that matter is eaten by black holes, other scientists say that cannot be true. So he says there must be other universes where they don't eat the matter, so it balances out. To me, that's absurd."However, Curtis began to be touched by Hawking's humanity, like in a clip when we see him saying goodnight to his child. 'Very good trashy music' One of the threads of Shifty is what Curtis calls "the rise in confidence among people to talk about your own feelings, your own experience".This is shown in one of the documentarian's favourite clips, which sees two boys in Swindon discussing the banning of the song Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood due to its sexual imagery. 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