Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball are often mistaken for each other. “It happens all the time,” says Jo. “I mean, every single week.” “It’s hilarious,” agrees Zoe. “I was sitting outside a pub near my brother’s in Kent last week, and a woman started talking passionately to me about how much she loves my outfits when I do the Glastonbury TV coverage. It’s got to the point now where we just go with it.” “Yeah,” nods Jo. “You don’t want to disappoint them.”
The broadcasters are old pals, having first met while working for the same TV production company in the early 90s. “Jo and I have known each other for… oh god, let’s do the maths,” says Zoe, before giving up. “I can’t do the maths.”
At this point, it would be remiss of me not to point out that Zoe’s dad is, of course, TV maths legend Johnny ‘Think of a Number’ Ball. “Oh, it’s shocking,” she says. “Every time I’m put on the spot in any mathematical situation, I can just see him shaking his head. He always says, ‘Zo, you’ve got other strengths… and one day we’ll figure out what they are.’
“But anyway, it’s a really long time, that we’ve known each other. Jo worked on The Word, where she booked all the cool bands, and I worked behind the scenes on The Big Breakfast. And I just thought she was the coolest woman who’d ever lived. She was a young mum, and she was booking the likes of Nirvana, while her gorgeous daughter, India, was basically the office therapy child. It blows my mind that she’s now in her 30s.”
“The reality is I wasn’t a cool kid at all,” insists Jo. “I was just a music obsessive, trying to figure out my life. And I was lucky that the company we worked for, Planet 24, were very forward-thinking – no-one thought anything of me bringing my child into work. My first impression of Zoe is that she was just this bundle of energy: incredibly warm and enthusiastic, and unbelievably friendly. Which is still absolutely the essence of who she is.”
As the 90s progressed, both would go on make their mark on TV and radio: Jo, along with her Radio One Evening Session wingman Steve Lamacq, was the standard-bearer for indie and Britpop, while Zoe juggled being the station’s first female breakfast show host with Saturday morning TV duties on Live & Kicking.
Three decades on, they’re now colleagues at Radio 2, where Jo still has her evening berth, and Zoe has just moved to Saturdays after six years as that station’s first female breakfast presenter. And, as of this summer, they are also now co-hosts of Dig It – a new twice-weekly podcast that promises to ‘lift the curtain on the messy, everyday reality of trying to live well’, covering everything from health, ageing and grief to home improvements, gardening and control underwear with the pair’s trademark wit, warmth and honesty.
“It’s really the conversations Jo and I tend to have with each other anyway – about work and family and health and parents and life,” explains Zoe, when we all meet over Zoom. “But instead of doing it on the phone or over text, we’re doing it as part of a wider community.”
Quite a sizeable community, as it turns out, as Dig It – which is from the same stable as Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver’s Miss Me? and Dua Lipa: At Your Service – debuted at number one on Apple’s podcast chart in July, racking up more than a million downloads in its first month. “We’re chuffed to bits,” beams Jo – who, incredibly, has just turned 60 (but looks at least 15 years younger). “I think a lot of our listeners are people who’ve grown up with us, and are facing all the same situations that we are.
“Life can be really hard, and it gets tougher as you get older. You think it’s hard when you’ve got toddlers having tantrums, but when you’ve got older kids who are trying to find their way in life, or you’re dealing with [ageing] parents, that’s the hard stuff. So the podcast is almost like a therapy session. It gives us a chance to be a bit more reflective and more open than on the radio.”
“It’s a strange time,” says Zoe, 54. “On the one hand, you’re thinking, life can be a bit more relaxed. But then there’s all this other stuff going on around you. You’re losing family and friends… I think it’s really important to take a moment and just stop, and be grateful for all the good stuff. Because life can be so bloody difficult and tough.”
Stopping to smell the flowers is an idea that Zoe and Jo take literally, being keen gardeners (hence Dig It). “I’m out there first thing, before I’ve even brushed my teeth or hair, pruning in my pants,” reveals Zoe, who lives near Brighton. “Which must be lovely for the neighbours…
“At our age, it’s okay to not want to go to the rave anymore. It’s okay to find different ways to relax. Gardening came to me when I went through great loss,” she says, of the heartbreak she suffered when her boyfriend Billy Yates took his own life in 2017. “My mum bought me something to plant in the tiny backyard I had, and I’d sit outside and just breathe in and out, and check the plants growing. That was such an incredible comfort to me.”
More recently, she has planted some roses for her mum, Julia, who died from cancer last year. “I was talking, on the podcast, about how the roses that I’d planted for my mum, and for Billy, had come out, and Jo was talking about the roses she has in her garden, for the special people she’s lost, and we got some really lovely messages from listeners. It really seemed to resonate.”
“I’ve been gardening for a long time now,” says Jo, whose home is a converted barn in her native Northamptonshire. “When I first started doing it, people were like, ‘is gardening the new rock and roll?’ But I never thought of it in those terms. It’s just a lovely, creative thing. I can’t draw, paint, sing or dance, but I can make the garden a beautiful space for everybody.”
Part of her motivation, she admits, is to have ‘a nest’ where her four children – India (now a food stylist who does regular work for Waitrose), Jude, Cassius and Coco – with her music exec husband ‘Disco’ Steve Morton will want to ‘fly back to’. “I just think, if I make it the best place in the world, they’ll never want to leave.”
“Undoubtedly we’ve had privileged lives. But there’s been a lot of other stuff going on alongside the highs”
The menopause is another topic that’s very much on Dig It’s radar, with both Jo and Zoe having navigated that particular life change in tandem with the highwire act that is live radio. “When you’re a broadcaster, not being able to find the right words is a nightmare,” recalls Jo, of the brain fog that descended when she was perimenopausal. “When you’re in the throes of something like that, and you feel like you’re going mad, you can feel very alone. I ended up sending secret messages to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour, because I’d seen her talking about it.”
For Jo, the timing couldn’t have been worse, as it coincided with her appointment in 2018 as Simon Mayo’s co-host on Radio 2’s Drivetime, prompting a vitriolic backlash from keyboard warriors who claimed she’d only been parachuted in to fulfil BBC diversity targets. (It was “horrible and unsettling” she told me in 2020.)
Thankfully, when it comes to talking about the menopause, “the landscape has changed completely”, she says. “Now we’re having conversations about it everywhere, which is fantastic.”
“I always talked about it on my Radio 2 show,” says Zoe, who had her first hot flush while interviewing Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in the studio. “The more open you are about these subjects, the easier it is for other people to talk about them. I talked a lot about losing my mum last year as well.”
On the first episode of Dig It, Zoe – who has a 24-year-old son, Woody, and a 15-year-old daughter, Nelly, with her ex-husband Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim – opened up about her chronic social anxiety. It’s a trait which might surprise anyone who’s heard her confidently holding court every morning in front of seven million listeners. But “it’s different when it’s your job,” she explains. “A lot of it is performance. Terry Wogan put it really well when he said a lot of broadcasters are introverted extroverts.
“Looking back, I think I’ve always had social anxiety, which is probably why I drank as much as I did back in the day,” she adds, of the alcohol addiction for which she sought treatment in rehab. “You think, ‘right, I’ll become this person I can hide behind’. As I’ve got older, I drink less – I can have a couple of drinks a week, but that’s about it. I can’t walk in somewhere and grab a drink anymore – that actually makes it worse. So it’s finding other ways to cope, and accepting it’s alright to live the quiet life.”
Though, for the record, Zoe hasn’t retired to work in Norman’s Hove beach café. “Nelly works there, and it was in the paper that I’d got a job as well,” she says. “I think I must have carried a plate, or something. But it’s always nice to have something to fall back on, right?”
Are Jo and Zoe still even a little bit rock and roll? “I don’t think I ever had a rock and roll side,” insists Jo. “When all the parties were going on in the 90s, I never went to them – or was never invited. Sitting in the Dublin Castle, eating peanuts with Steve Lamacq, was probably about as rock and roll as it got. For me, it’s always been about the music more than the lifestyle.”
“I spent a lot of time looking back at my adventures in the 90s with my hand over my eyes,” admits Zoe. “’I did what? Oh gosh.’ But I’ve got to the point now where I can relax into it. Enough time has passed that I can think: we were so incredibly lucky to live through that era of incredible music and culture, to be at the heart of it. Now, when I’m being very un-rock and roll, I can look back and go: yeah, but we did live a bit of a life, and we definitely kicked the butt out of it. It was an amazing era.”
Such were their lives back then, Jo recently forgot that she’d introduced Oasis on stage in front of 250,000 people at Knebworth. “I told my husband, ‘no, I never went to Knebworth’. I had no memory of it at all. So maybe I did party a bit!” (Plus, she hasn’t entirely retreated to tend her azaleas: this month she starts a nationwide tour of her hugely popular 90s Anthems live show.)
I wonder if having lived such heightened, exciting lives is one reason why, in middle-age, both women are happy to kick back and enjoy more of the quiet life? “It’s a tricky one,” considers Zoe. “Because, yeah, we got to do fun things, and fulfil dreams. But I also know that life hasn’t been that straightforward. I think life’s actually been a pretty rocky rollercoaster at times.”
Jo nods her agreement. “Undoubtedly, we have had very privileged lives,” she says. “But there’s also been a lot of other stuff going on alongside the highs.”
Which, of course, is exactly what makes Dig It‘s laughter and tears approach so relatable. “Sharing is good,” says Jo. “I always feel a lot better after talking to my mates about difficult or ludicrous situations I’m going through. It’s a healthy thing to do.”
“And that’s what we want our listeners and viewers to feel,” says Zoe. “Like we’re all mates, making it up as we go along, just trying to help each other through it all.”
New episodes of Dig It are released Mondays and Wednesdays on all podcast platforms – or watch the show on YouTube and Spotify
This interview was published in Waitrose Weekend on 11 September, 2025
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