Latest news with #JohnnyBall
Daily Mail
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Zoe Ball's famous dad Johnny says her relationship with her ex-husband Fatboy Slim is better than ever
Johnny Ball has claimed his daughter Zoe Ball has a better relationship with her ex-husband Fatboy Slim now than when they were married. The TV personality, 87, made the surprising revelation in a new interview with Boom Radio - almost 10 years on from their 2016 separation. While the couple were together for 18 years, their relationship was not entirely smooth sailing and they briefly split in 2003 after Zoe had an affair with DJ Dan Peppe. Johnny said: 'They're very good friends today, you know. They're great friends. They're divorced, but they're better…. 'If you like they're closer today than they were when they were married. And that's a lovely thing. It's a lovely thing.' The former couple share two children together - Woody Fred Cook, 24, and Nelly May Louise Cook, 15. Elsewhere in the interview, Johnny opened up about the early part of his career as he reflected on a whopping six decades in the spotlight. Daughter Zoe was quick to follow in her father's showbiz footsteps and made a successful career for herself as a DJ in the nineties. It was this work that caused her to cross paths with Fatboy Slim, real name Norman Cook, now 62, while working for Radio 1 in Ibiza in 1998. Following the couple's split in 2017, Norman spoke of going through a 'traumatic year' and said that music provided him with a much-needed form of escapism. He told the Daily Star: 'My music and shows have always been about escapism, for people to forget what's wrong in their life. 'I've done it for 30 years but, because my life was happy, I was providing that escapism for the crowds. And now they're providing that escapism for me. 'Having hit a traumatic year, for those two hours when I'm on stage, I forget all my worries and I feel like I can escape.' Opening up further, he admitted that he actually feels like he is a better DJ when he is going through difficult things in his personal life. He added: 'Because of my marital situation, I have a lot more time on my hands. Practically, I see less of the kids than I used to, so I have more time to make music.' Following the couple's split, Zoe entered into a relationship with Billy Yates in 2017, a cameraman who tragically died by suicide that same year. She went on to date production boss Michael Reed from December 2017 to 2023 after reportedly growing apart. While Zoe's love life has played out publicly since splitting with Norman, little is known about his romances since their breakup, although he was linked to Zoe's friend Nicola Lokko in 2018. The former couple are reported to have settled into an effective co-parenting relationship and Zoe praised Norman's ability as a father in 2020 to Red magazine, describing him as the 'best dad'. She said: 'He is such a good friend and a good guy. It's not always been easy and it's taken time.'
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Zoe Ball set for new TV role just weeks after returning to BBC Radio 2
BBC Radio 2 presenter Zoe Ball is set to make a return to TV alongside her dad Johnny Ball and son Woody Cook. Ball returned to BBC Radio 2 in May after stepping down from her breakfast show in December 2024. She also hosted TV special VE Day 80: A Celebration to Remember on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on May 8. Scott Mills (left) replaced Zoe Ball (right) on BBC Radio 2's breakfast show. (Image: James Manning/PA Wire) Now it appears Ball has landed another TV role. The 54-year-old could be set to star on a new factual series about maths, created by her father Johnny Ball, according The Sun. The new show would tell the story behind 'the history of maths' and is based on the first six chapters of his book - Wonders Beyond Numbers. Zoe and Johnny Ball would team up to host the show along with Zoe's son Woody Cook. Johnny Ball, speaking to The Sun, said: '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.' A channel for this untitled show is yet to be decided, with Johnny hoping to convince TV bosses to commission the series, admitting having Zoe on board is a 'big pull'. Zoe and son Woody have appeared on Celebrity Gogglebox before, but this would be the first time three generations of Ball have appeared on air together. Zoe Ball announced she was quitting her BBC Radio 2 breakfast show role in December last year, and was eventually replaced early in 2025 by Scott Mills. She had been in the role for six years, but said it was time to step away so she could "focus on family". Ball, at the time, added: "It's been a privilege. I think the world of you listeners and I'm grateful to my bosses here for their support, especially this year." It came after a tough 2024 for the radio presenter who was forced to take time away from BBC Radio 2 after her mother, Julia, was "heartbreakingly" diagnosed with cancer before succumbing to the disease in April. RECOMMENDED READING: Zoe Ball returns to BBC Radio 2 after quitting the Breakfast Show 4 months ago Zoe Ball is in 'a good place' after quitting BBC Radio 2 breakfast show Zoe Ball to star in popular BBC TV series following Radio 2 return, reports say However, Ball returned to Radio 2 on May 3 with a brand new show. She now goes to air once a week from 1pm to 3pm on Saturdays, having replaced Mark Goodier's Pick Of The Pops, which has moved to Sundays. You can listen to Zoe Ball every Saturday from 1pm to 3pm on BBC Radio 2.
Daily Mail
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Zoe Ball is set to 'share a rare insight into her life in surprise new TV gig featuring three generations of her family'
Zoe Ball has reportedly been eyeing up a return to TV and the surprise gig could be a family affair. The Radio 2 DJ's famous presenter father Johnny Ball, 87, is said to have created a new educational series - and he wants his daughter to front it. Johnny is known for popularising mathematics and The Sun has reported his new show will focus on the history of the subject. The show will feature Johnny, 87, his daughter Zoe, 54, and his DJ grandson Woody Cook, 24, and to complement the family hosting it will look at the history of maths across three generations. Johnny is said to be so invested in the series, he rejected the opportunity for him, Zoe and Woody to compete as a trio on Celebrity Race Across The World. It will be the second time Zoe appears on screen with her son Woody, who she shares with her ex-husband Fat Boy Slim, after they did Gogglebox together. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. Her father's maths show is reportedly based on the first six chapters of his book, Wonders Beyond Numbers. Speaking to The Sun, he said: '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.' It comes after last week Zoe revealed she was suffering from a new health condition, shortly after after making her Radio 2 comeback. She gave her listeners an update on her wellbeing as she spoke on her show and revealed she has been diagnosed with bursitis. Bursitis is when the fluid-filled sacs (bursa) that cushion the joints have become painful and swollen. It comes after last year she revealed she had been battling another painful health condition - TMJ (temporomandibular joint) - after announcing her departure from her Breakfast Show host role. At the time she said she was quitting her breakfast show to 'focus on family' and then also had to face the health condition which causes bad headaches. Speaking about her bursitis this weekend on her show she said: 'Yes, it's come to that. Fifty-four and I got bursitis.' Despite the pain she has still been training with her personal coach, Seth, in a bid to improve her strength. 'Thank you to Seth,' she said on the show. 'I found out I've got a… what is it? A rating of… was it a four or five on the fitness level? 'I was quite impressed with myself - out of, I think it's nine or ten. You've gotta start somewhere, haven't you?'. Zoe returned to her new Saturday afternoon show on BBC Radio 2 in early May after previously taking a step back to focus on time with her family. The star stepped down from her breakfast show in December to 'focus on her family,' bidding farewell to her £950,000 salary. Reconnecting with her listeners she announced: '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.' Happy to see the star's return, a viewer wrote: 'Great to have you back, Saturday afternoon is much better than having to wake up early.' She proceeded to read out some other well wishes she then added: 'It is lovely to be here thanks for all your messages'. After six years at the helm, Zoe handed her BBC Radio 2 breakfast show over to Scott Mills after stepping down to 'focus on family' just months after her mother Julia's death in April. Then in February, Radio 2 officially announced programme changes, including a new weekly show with Zoe (1-3pm on Saturdays). She will also be hosting two specials, including a BBC TV show celebrating Elaine Paige's 60-year career in showbusiness. Helen Thomas, Head of Radio 2, said at the time: 'Zoe is one of the UK's most loved presenters, so I'm thrilled to announce that she has a new home on Radio 2 on Saturday lunchtimes.
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.'
