Zoe Balls Daughter Moves in with Dad Cook

How many of us can relate to fretting over her ‘empty nest’? The former Radio 2 DJ said this week it is ‘so quiet’ now at her home in – a familiar and sad refrain of any middle-aged woman whose children have grown and flown.

Zoe, 55, has two children with ex-husband Fatboy Slim (aka Norman Cook): their son Woody is 25 and living in Bristol working as a DJ, while their daughter Nelly is 16 and currently sitting her GCSEs at a very expensive private school in Sussex.

As she is still in full-time education, surely Zoe could have expected her to remain under her roof for another couple of years at least?

Yet Zoe, speaking to DJ friend Jo Whiley on their Dig It podcast this week, revealed Nelly has chosen to live with her father instead of dividing her time between their houses.

‘Nell is based more at her dad’s now because I think she’s got to that point of “Ah, can I just be in one place?”,’ she said.

‘All of her revision notes are on the wall at her dad’s and it’s just [nice] not having to move from house to house, so she’s just spending more time there now.’

Always chirpy, Zoe added: ‘It’s great because it’s only around the corner and I can nip round at any time and she can come here if she gets upset about anything like, “Mum, I need you” but it’s less and less.’

Being needed less and less is another painful challenge familiar to parents at this time of life but, aside from her desire not to cart her books from one house to another, has anything else prompted Nelly to want to live with Dad?

Could it have anything to do with the not-insignificant matter of Zoe’s new boyfriend, TV production designer Mathieu Weeks, whom she’s been dating for a year and has already moved in with?

A friend says: ‘We have wondered, with Nelly not being around much, if it was something to do with the new man. Zoe is always “all in” when a new man is on the scene and it’s possible Nelly felt left out or didn’t like it.’

However the friend stresses mother and daughter still get on and are very much in each other’s lives, and that the most likely reason is the ‘scatty’ and ‘chaotic’ way that Zoe operates.

‘Nelly has always spent a lot of time with her dad – especially when Zoe was doing the breakfast show because she would stay up in London for that.

‘The kids love their mum and she loves them. She’s in no way a bad person, but the general feeling is she’s just scatty and Norman is more of a safe pair of hands and calm port in a storm.

‘Zoe and Nelly are a bit “Saffy and Edina” – Nelly is sweet and calm and quite shy, much more like Norman, whereas Zoe is pure chaos and mania.’

Saffy and Edina are of course the mother and daughter immortalised in the hit Nineties sitcom Absolutely Fabulous with Jennifer Saunders as Edina, the overbearing, eccentric PR mum, and Julia Sawalha as her sensible, strait-laced daughter Saffy.

Zoe perhaps hinted at their contrasting personalities previously when she once told an interviewer: ‘I love my daughter so much, she’s amazing.

‘She’s sassy as hell and I know she’s going to be OK out there in the big wide world because she’s strong-willed and she’s tough. But, oh lordy, there is no telling her!’ Zoe moved in to her Brighton townhouse close to Norman’s at the end of the summer in 2024.

Months before, her mother Julia had died aged 74 after a brutally brief struggle with pancreatic cancer, which lasted just 12 weeks from her diagnosis.

It was at that point Zoe decided to walk away from her £500,000-a-year radio job to deal with her grief and focus on her family.

Quite specifically, she said last November that she wanted to have the chance to be a ‘mummy’ to daughter Nelly.

So while some might be surprised at Nelly’s new living arrangements, Zoe’s friends insist it is definitely not a replay of a difficult period in her own childhood. Zoe was estranged from her mother from the age of seven until she was 18, after Julia divorced Zoe’s father, mathematician and TV presenter Johnny Ball.

Zoe explained: ‘She stayed away because she thought it would give me more stability. It was never a problem for me because I always knew she was there.’

When they were finally reunited Zoe said it was as if they had never been apart.

But there is no question of Zoe not seeing Nelly. The friend explains that, in reality, the arrangements aren’t quite as simple as choosing to live with either her mother or father, as Zoe and Norman, 62 – both multimillionaires who have been famous for decades – have staff. They each have a personal assistant and Norman also has a housekeeper-cum-nanny who helps out with Nelly when he is away.

As she faced up to the stress of exams, the stability of her father’s house – plus his team – made more sense.

And for the more chaotic atmosphere at Zoe’s, it’s three years now since she was diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder).

The presenter has said both Woody and Nell have the same diagnosis and they all benefit from medication to help calm their impulsivity.

Zoe first revealed her diagnosis in December 2023, saying: ‘My brain is just all over the goddamn shop. When you’ve got ADHD, you’re so easily distracted. You’ll start a task and then you move on to something else.

‘So I can see sometimes why Nell might live in chaos and her clothes are everywhere.

‘But she started doing a thing now where every Sunday night, if she stays with me, she will give herself a couple of hours – tidy her room, get her stuff ready for school, put her things away, have a nice shower, do her hair. And I’ve loved seeing her find this for herself.'

She realises, though, that all three of them also feel their emotions very sharply.

As she confided to Jo on Dig It: ‘I think if you have ADHD, you feel things. You take things so personally. And those extremes of emotions can be quite hard to handle.’

Certainly Zoe’s personal life has been a rollercoaster of grief and loss which anyone would find challenging.

Rising to prominence on the BBC children’s TV show Live And Kicking, Zoe went on to have stints on The Big Breakfast and Top Of The Pops and, in 1997, took the helm of the Radio 1 Breakfast Show.

She met Norman the following year in Ibiza, they married in 1999 and Woody was born in December 2000.

In 2003, they separated briefly after Norman discovered Zoe had been unfaithful with his friend, the DJ Dan Peppe. Norman was determined to save their marriage, however, telling reporters: ‘I still love her. If you love someone, you’ll forgive them.’

The pair reconciled the following month, and in 2009 they both decided to get sober together, seeking professional help for alcoholism. Nelly was born a year later, and Zoe called her ‘my gift of sobriety’.

The couple split for good in 2016 and soon Zoe started to date cameraman Billy Yates. She felt he was the ‘love of her life’, however he suffered from depression and despite therapy and her support, he took his own life in his London flat in May 2017.

A recovering alcoholic, Billy, 40, had been drinking on the day of his death. A coroner’s court heard that he had tried to kill himself twice before, and Zoe had previously paid for him to spend a fortnight in the mental health clinic Priory.