Latest news with #JohnnyBall
Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Johnny Ball: ‘We saved £700 by burying asbestos under the patio'
Johnny Ball, 86, is a TV personality and former comedian. Once a host of Play School, he wrote and presented 20 TV series in the 1980s – such as Think of a Number and Johnny Ball Reveals All – to inspire confidence in maths, science and technology. He has also written and produced corporate videos and five educational stage musicals and is a published author, with books including Mathmagicians and Wonders Beyond Numbers. Today, Ball gives talks for educational and business conferences, maths and science training, schools, and does promotional work and commercials. He lives in a village in Buckinghamshire with his wife, Dianne. What attracted you to your home? When we bought our 1927 house for £50,000 in 1978 – the neighbours sniggered because it was a wreck. To the north of us, you're in fields almost immediately. I'm on an A-road, but in the office, I can't hear a sound when there's traffic. We had three young children when we moved in, and it's always worked as our family home. It's five to six bedrooms because the master bedroom is big enough for two rooms. The garden was overgrown, but you could see it had been cared for. I'm a happy man with a saw or screwdriver in my hand. Everywhere I look, I can say ' built that' or 'I designed it, put it in and fitted it'. I fitted the kitchen myself apart from the worktops, and the cupboards and shelves in my office. What does 'home' mean to you? I think our home is the location. We love the area, the neighbours. I go to pubs regularly, and have two pints with friends. And Di and I have pubs we go to. We walk the dog every day, plus we've got supermarkets not far away. We're in the Chiltern Hundreds and have a running club – JAWS: Joggers and Wife Swappers…no, hang on, Joggers and Wheelers Society. They do cycling and walking trips. We also have breakfast every Sunday in a member's house, and once a year we're host to 30 to 40 people. Di and I may be rattling around in a house that's too big, but we love it. What's your biggest home improvement? The big extension I designed. We did two extensions – one for the kitchen and one where we extended the bedroom to give us more room. The lounge is huge as well. It was a single-fronted gabled house like Monopoly board houses when I bought it. Do you have a favourite room? My office. I'm in it every day – windows, my drum kit, settee and window seat. At the end of my big desk is a hexagonal spur for meetings. I've got shelves for memorabilia and maths, history and humour books and 18 cupboards full of scripts I wrote, corporate videos I did and things I promoted like toys, geometry and chemistry kits. The structure in your living room stands out, can you talk me through it? It is a sculpture that one of my sons made at Saint Martin's for a fine art degree task to design something from nature that is usable. It represents a Venus fly trap and you can sit in it. How does your home compare to your childhood home? I was born in Bristol where life was idyllic. We lived in a small brick terraced house at the end of a row of four. But the house was in an awful state, with broken-down cars outside. One useful thing our back garden had was raspberry plants. During the war, you couldn't get fruit, so in the raspberry season, it was a luxury for me to come home and have a bowl full of raspberries with milk and sugar. My parents came from Lancashire and moved back to Bolton when I was 11, in 1949, and bought a shop that had been closed for years because it didn't work. They didn't see that the catchment area meant few customers passing the shop, so it failed. Suddenly, from being idyllically happy and passing my 11-plus in Bolton, in the next few years, we were very poor. How many properties have you lived in? Nine – all houses except for two flats I had in Blackpool. But I've only owned two, one in Heston, west of London – a three-storey town house with integral garage – and this one. It was near the BBC, as was this house. I moved here when the BBC was at Wood Lane, 20 minutes away. It was an ideal position. I was still doing the clubs occasionally and was on the M40 going north, in Birmingham in just over an hour. Do you garden? We have the luxury of having gardeners who come in once a week. They do all the heavy stuff, the lawn and feeding it and keeping it spick and span. But we do the rest. When I did the extension for my office, a rockery was where that room is now. So I drew a sketch of it, placed all the rockery stones to one side, built the extension and replanted the rockery. We've got a cracking garden centre near to us and we pick plants together. I've got a beautiful yellow thing and lovely red stuff – don't know what they are, but it's all gorgeous. What are the best and worst things about your garden? No worst thing, except it can flood by the bottom gate – but only for a day if it's a deluge, when the drains back up. Best, it's a garden that looks after itself – a lot of hedges and shrubbery rather than flower beds. Where would you live if you had to move? We don't want to move and have never desired a property in the sun. Because Di does most of our cooking at home, when we go away on holiday, we go to hotels rather than apartments, so she can do nothing but be waited on. Has any design feature of your home presented a problem? When I changed the garage, it had a low-pitched roof made of corrugated asbestos. When I had to take it down, I rang the council. They told me to take it down and they'd pick it up – but they'd charge me £700. When I asked why, they told me 'because it's dangerous'. 'But you just told me to take it down', I replied. And they recommended I 'sprinkle it with water and wear a mask'. I said, 'So if it's not a problem, why are you charging £700?'. In the end, we got the asbestos down and buried it under the patio. It saved £700. Has your home presented unwanted surprises? When we built the kitchen extension, on the other side of the breakfast bar, I built a five-inch-platform so you could sit there on normal chairs, not stools – which I hate. However, if the people on the outside wanted to leave, the platform ended 1m from the wall. So when you wanted to go to the loo, you had to put your hand up and ask because if you just put your chair back, the back legs could go off the platform. One lady fell with me and another fella both grabbing her, and we all fell in slow motion. And Paul McCartney's business manager, Steve Shrimpton, who lived locally, once went off the back and hit his head on the wall just above the skirting board. I'm thinking, 'I'm not insured for Paul McCartney's business manager to beat his brains out on my wall'. He was Australian and got up saying, 'Geez John, I've crooked your chair!'.
Telegraph
13-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Johnny Ball on Playschool: ‘I dropkicked Humpty through the round window'
'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.'
