Zoe Ball has reflected on the “uncomfortable” experience of posing for lads’ mags such as Loaded while she fronted Top of the Pops for the BBC in the Nineties.
The Radio 2 presenter, 54, regularly hosted the chart show alongside Jayne Middlemiss and Jo Whiley, who said she’d been relieved Ball “took one for the team” and did the objectifying photoshoots.
Ball recalled arriving at a studio in her twenties to find “racks of tiny clothes” for her to wear. The presenter was then told to “straddle a chair” while the magazine images were taken.
“It was very male and we just sucked it up, went with it, we were almost expected to play up to it a little bit,” Ball told The Times of the “ladette” era. “It’s only years later you look back and think, goodness me,” she said.
Ball added that the experience had been “quite uncomfortable” but she felt like she had to comply with the requests – even if she didn’t enjoy the experience.
“There was no saying, ‘I don’t think she wants to do it,’ you’re conditioned to think, ‘that’s just how it is,” she reflected on the ordeal.
The presenter added if anyone asked her teenage daughter Nelly to do something similar to the lads’ mags photoshoots she was booked for when she was young, she would be furious.
Loaded magazine ceased print publication in March 2015 following UK Feminista’s 2013 “Lose the Lads’ Mags” campaign, which saw supermarkets begin to pull titles like Zoo and Nuts from its shelves.
Nuts printed its final issue in 2014, with Zoo and FHM ceasing publication the following year.
Ball was a regular presenter on Top of the Pops until 1998, when she became the first woman to be the sole host of the BBC’s Radio 1 Breakfast.
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Before Ball quit Radio 2’s Breakfast Show after five years over health concerns in December 2024, she was declared the second highest-paid BBC presenter after Gary Lineker, earning £950,000 a year.
She said: “I’m so grateful to the BBC and this is something if you do a certain job that comes with the territory. But it’ll be great not to have to worry about those lists any more.”
The presenter now hosts the Dig It podcast alongside Whiley, which garnered more than one million downloads in its first month.
