chrismoyles.net
- Mon Jan 05, 2004 1:10 am
#133437
So did Greyhead push the buttons for Zoe? And I never get the feeling Cox is in control of anything.
At least talking about being bullied at school doesn't make her cry like the big twit Evans.
The Observer wrote:Don't call me a ladette
In her first interview since her new radio show was announced, Sara Cox talks about the bliss of pregnancy, the vileness of tabloids and the one label that still makes her blood boil
Miranda Sawyer
Sunday January 4, 2004
The Observer
Just before 10am on 19 December 2003, Sara Cox played her last ever record as presenter of Radio 1's Breakfast Show. It was 'I've Had the Time of My Life' by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes: a cheesy choice, picked to make you laugh as well as understand exactly how she was feeling. For 'Coxy' had indeed had a top time hosting Breakfast; but now that her position is to be handed to Chris 'I'm the saviour of Radio 1' Moyles, she's not one to weep. Sara sees the joke in most situations.
'What's that nice little phrase - "give me the power to accept the things I can't change"?' she says, in her chewy Bolton purr. 'That's what I'm like. I'm quite laidback. If I drop something and smash it, I'm not like, Jesus Christ! I'm more like, it's a *, but you can't do anything about it.'
She twists a silly face and pulls at her orange juice (no vodka, she's three months' pregnant and it is only 11am). We're in an upmarket London members' bar, yet Sara has somehow managed to get a proper greasy-spoon bacon sandwich, rubber bread and all. She thanks the waitress profusely.
Despite her laissez-faire cool, Sara worked hard at the Breakfast Show, and, at her peak, pulled in 7.6 million listeners: half a million more than Zoë Ball, two million more than Chris Evans, the best Breakfast ratings for the past eight years. Last year, her Rajar (Radio Joint Audience Research) figures dropped by 620,000; but then, Chris Moyles's Drivetime slot, which Sara is taking over from tomorrow, lost 80,000 more.
'You do wonder where have they all gone?' she laughs. 'It'd been going up and up and then... I always hope it's a mass death among 16- to 24-year-olds. A good handful of car crashes and ecstasy deaths. Oh God, that's awful. Listen to me or die. The only alternative is death.'
Not quite so laidback, then. Really, Sara has mixed emotions about the job-swap. She's aware that it's seen as 'a demotion: Breakfast is always going to be the biggest show', but she's excited about her new slot, looking forward to 'making nice little packages', hosting quizzes, maybe going to Crufts (she loves dogs), setting things up properly before the show rather than turning up and flying by the seat of her hot pants. Plus she'd been given an option to leave Breakfast next April and she was going to take it, even before she knew of her pregnancy, because it's been almost four years 'and I was knackered'. Getting up every day at 5am takes its toll.
Unlike Zoë Ball, Sara drives the radio desk herself and she controls her show, rather than using the Chris Evans-style zoo format where other presenters chime in: 'There's no hiding behind the computer at Breakfast, no getting in late and looking busy when you feel shit.'
When she'd first got the job, in March 2000, Sara tried to continue with her naturally hectic social life, but after a year she realised it was impossible. So she's been staying in a lot, getting twitchy if she was still out after 7pm, chivied when strangers pointed at their watches and said, 'Shouldn't you be in bed?', feeling martyrish compared to her all-night girlfriends. Those same friends phoned her up, cheering, glad to have the old Sara back, as soon as they heard about her leaving Breakfast.
Which was not long after Sara herself was informed. She was told that she and Moyles were to swap by Andy Parfitt, Radio 1's controller, at midday on 7 October last year. She asked: 'Who's got the Breakfast Show, then?' and when Parfitt said Chris, she said: 'Evans?' 'But I meant Moylesy. I was just spun out, weirded out.' Anyway, just two hours later, at 2pm, the Cox-Moyles change-over was announced on Radio 1's Newsbeat: 'Jon [Carter, DJ and Sara's husband] was annoyed about that. He got all protective, like, bloody hell, that's a bit quick. Maybe it would have been nice to announce it myself the next morning, but with Breakfast, the fuss is all about the incoming DJ, not about the outgoing one. And I was pleased for Moylesy. Cos he's always wanted it.'
He has indeed: Chris Moyles is a radio nerd who's been preparing for this moment since he was eight years old, boasting in public for the past few years that he could 'absolutely kick anybody's arse on Breakfast ever', the twit. Sara has never been so focused, so open-wound ambitious. She fell into radio hosting, like she did with TV presenting and, before that, modelling. Now she loves it.
'I'd like to do radio forever, really,' she says. 'I prefer it to telly. It's more immediate and I'm in control of it all. And I like not worrying about what I look like; I like people concentrating on what I'm saying. When I'm on telly, I feel a bit trussed up and I hate make-up and it does put weight on you and I look and see my chins.
'Like with Born Sloppy [her recent Channel 4 show], I loved everyone I worked with, but I thought I should have moved on from that stuff. On telly, if it's not the right kind of show, I revert back to my Girlie Show persona, become this daft, bawdy caricature of myself and I'm not actually like that, I'm actually quite - not clever, but smart with my words .
'On radio, you're allowed to tell a good story with a good punch line, like you would when you hold court in the pub. Oh, maybe not in the pub - that's a bit ladette - when you're round someone's house.'
Ah, the L word. And, indeed, the G word. Sara was deemed a ladette around 1996, during her first media job, as a presenter on Channel 4's shouty, sexy, post-pub Girlie Show. She wasn't alone: so were Zoë Ball, Ulrika Jonsson, Gail Porter, Denise Van Outen and Elastica's Justine Frischmann.
In the mid-Nineties, if you were a young British woman in the public eye who didn't simper or dress like Liz Hurley, who liked going out and staying out, who could hold her drink and her own with man or woman, you were automatically deemed a ladette. With Sara, the title has stuck and she hates it. 'If they'd come up with a really clever word, then you'd be like, OK, maybe you've got us, but the word ladette... the connotations are, we're little lads, we wanna be lads. As though we're fans of the laddish way, like if you're a fan of Bros, you're a Brosette. I was a Brosette, I'd admit that proudly, but ladette... God.'
She's hoping that maybe the cliché will crumble now she's pregnant: her mate, Zoë Ball, herself a mother, has been promoted to 'former ladette'. Sara is thrilled about having a baby: 'Once it's born, I'll probably be back on the fags and swigging gin, but at the moment it's all rose-tinted papooses and designer baby clothes.' She and Jon have thought about names, but they're not saying which ones: 'Nothing too pop-starry. We won't be calling it Lollipop Wolverhampton, if that's what you're thinking.'
She does make me laugh, Sara; she's great company. Maybe that's where the ladette thing comes from. Men are meant to be our entertainers, leaving women to giggle and witter about shoes, therefore an entertaining woman must be trying to be like a man. Plus, Sara is a self-confessed daddy's girl, even though her mum, Jackie, and dad, Len, a farmer, split when she was six, and she and her sister, Yvonne, went to live with her mum.
Her older siblings, from her dad's previous relationship, stayed with Len, who paid Jackie £12 a week maintenance. Jackie and her new man worked hard to support Sara and her sister, running Conservative clubs, working multiple jobs, and both girls have turned out well.
Yvonne, a lawyer, is driven: 'She's really dynamic, runs the New York marathon, speaks four languages, skydives. I can't put into words just how little I'd like to jump out of an aeroplane.' Sara is more happy-go-lucky. Despite loving her mum and appreciating her efforts, she aims to be like her non-confrontational dad, deliberately weeding out any characteristics she sees as inherited from her more highly strung mother.
And though now Sara is loyal to her very dear female friends, she had troubles with girls when she was younger. She was badly bullied when she moved school. Born with a dislocated hip ('and an allergy to milk and I was breach, on Friday the 13th!' - 13 December 1974), in her teenage years, Sara's long legs were slightly *.
'So, couple my legs with my perm, and having a name like Cox as well...' She smiles wryly. 'When you move schools, it's all down to those first two days. If you walk in confident, you're all right, and I never did, I'd just shuffle in. One time, I went and told my head of year about being bullied. And he accused me of lying, cos this girl was one of his favourite pupils. He said, "Well, I don't know why you're saying this about Joanne, but I've known her for many years..." She was funny and charming and * and he just had a soft spot for her, and I was new. It took him to look out of the window and see me getting pulled around in the playground for him to apologise.'
Even now she's no good at girl games. 'If someone says something nasty about another friend, I'd stick up for my friend, but I wouldn't go and tell that person what I'd said. I'm no good with cliques. That's why I hung out with lads a lot, cos I could deal with them. If they've got summut to say, they'll take the piss out of you to your face. I'm rubbish at conflict, I like calmness and security. I hate any drama.'
Sara has found non-dramatic, calm security in her marriage, and in her career at Radio 1: she's signed up for another two years. She and Jon live in a big house in north London. 'We've been there a year and we've still not got a single lampshade. We've got arty porn pictures up though.'
His 10-year-old son, Sam, comes to stay and comments on the swear words on the fridge. The house, to Sara's delight, has a big kitchen table and a lovely front door. As a kid, she was embarrassed when friends dropped her off at her mum's house: council houses all have the same, thin front doors. 'I sound like such a snob, don't I? My mum's gonna kill me.'
Sara is naturally confiding and, as a result, has been slightly stitched up by journalists who whisk her honesty into sensation. But there have only been two pieces she's really objected to. The first was in the Mail, which said she wasn't working class, but middle class, because her dad had a farm and she rode horses. 'That really hurt, it pissed over the memory of my late stepdad, my mum holding down three jobs to feed us. My stepdad was unemployed for three years in the Eighties, it was really hardcore.'
Far worse were the invasive pictures published by the People of Sara and Jon on their honeymoon in 2001. A photographer rented the next-door villa and took pictures of them naked, which the People plastered over its front page. Even now, when she talks about it, Sara's voice becomes quiet and sad: 'They've sullied my memories of my honeymoon forever. I'll never forgive them, ever.'
She and Jon sued and got a printed apology; and then sued and won a landmark human rights case. It took a year.
'I don't really talk about it much because it's so upsetting,' she says. 'Whenever I think of my honeymoon, I think about that court case. It would have bankrupted us if it had gone wrong. Every day for a year, I'd think, God, I could lose everything, I could be kipping on a mate's floor, but I just didn't want mine and Jon's kids or Jon's little lad to enter our names on the internet and come up with pornographic images of what we were doing in a private area on our honeymoon. It was wrong.
'He was sat there for ages taking those pictures. On our * honeymoon. We were so relaxed, in our own piece of heaven. I've never even gone topless on a beach, I've never done topless pictures - I'm not that confident about my body. And I was smoking in them and my dad thought I'd given up.'
When Sara saw the paper, her best friend Clare had drawn a bikini on her, to try and make her feel better. The final settlement, which saw the People pay £50,000 damages and all court costs, included a demand that the photographer destroy every copy of the images, including electronic versions.
Sara might dislike conflict, she might be a softy who cries when she argues, she might see the funny side of most situations, but she can be tough when she's forced to be. Being a ladette isn't just about joking and drinking. These days, she doesn't let the bullies win.
Unlike Zoë Ball, Sara drives the radio desk herself and she controls her show, rather than using the Chris Evans-style zoo format where other presenters chime in: 'There's no hiding behind the computer at Breakfast, no getting in late and looking busy when you feel *.'
So did Greyhead push the buttons for Zoe? And I never get the feeling Cox is in control of anything.
At least talking about being bullied at school doesn't make her cry like the big twit Evans.
