Zoe Ball is returning to broadcasting at BBC Radio 2’s biggest rival – and revealed the move in a Traitors-inspired trailer with Ken Bruce and Simon Mayo.

The veteran DJ, 55, will host weekday afternoons on Greatest Hits Radio later this year.

She will take over from Kate Thornton on September 7 and will be sandwiched between her former BBC Radio 2 colleagues, Mr Bruce and Mr Mayo.

In a dig at the BBC, Greatest Hits announced Zoe’s arrival with a Traitors-style reveal and the caption: ‘One more from the old place! Please welcome our newest recruit.’

It will be Zoe’s first daily radio programme since leaving the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show two years ago and comes after she was turned down to present Strictly Come Dancing.

She said: ‘I’ve missed it and this felt like the right time to begin a new chapter with Greatest Hits Radio.’

Ms Ball left BBC Radio 2 at the height of her success, quitting the coveted Breakfast Show in 2024 and her Saturday afternoon show a year later.

Zoe Ball’s Traitors reveal of a new job at BBC Radio 2’s biggets rival

Zoe Ball to join Greatest Hits Radio, revealed in a Traitors-inspired reveal with Ken Bruce and Simon Mayo

The broadcaster, 55, will be the new host of weekday afternoons on Greatest Hits Radio later this year.

She will take over from Kate Thornton on September 7 and will be sandwiched between her former BBC Radio 2 colleagues, Bruce and Mayo.

Last month, Ms Ball told of her ‘grief’ at being turned down by the BBC after auditioning to become one of the new Strictly Come Dancing hosts.

The positions have now been filled by Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe following a rigorous audition process.

Prior to quitting the Radio 2 Breakfast Show, Ms Ball had been one of the Corporation’s highest-paid female stars, taking home £950,000 a year.

After an extended break following her mother’s death, she returned to the show for just a few months before announcing her departure at the end of 2024.

She took over the Saturday afternoon slot but also quit that less than a year later in December 2025.

She also told how suffering from ‘crippling anxiety’ while coping with the grief of her mother’s death and going through perimenopause left her struggling to get through the shows.

The long-running BBC presenter, 55, said she started to have ‘panic attacks’ after her mother Julia died from pancreatic cancer in April 2024.

Coupled with symptoms of the perimenopause, Ms Ball said she often found herself ‘struggling’ to do her radio shows.

‘For me personally I’ve always been very laid back, I worry about the regular things,’ she said on the most recent episode of her Dig It podcast with Jo Whiley.

‘But I started to have panic attacks and I think it was from grief, because that’s when it started for me.’

She added: ‘And then along came perimenopause as well and then I started to have crippling anxiety to the point where I was struggling to work or get through a show.’

She said that ‘crippling’ was ‘the word’ she would use to describe how she felt, adding that she ‘didn’t really know where to go with it’ as she was reluctant to visit her GP.

Ms Ball, who recently revealed that her daughter Nelly, 16, had moved in with her ex-husband Norman Cook, said she has now ‘come out of it’ and since ‘learned a lot about it.’

The presenter said that, for two years during that period, she was on antidepressants to cope with the anxiety and panic attacks.

‘I did take them for a couple of years,’ she wrote on Instagram in reply to a follower’s comment,

‘A low dose of sertraline. Via my doctor. Not on them anymore. Talk to your GP. I appreciate everyone has a very different experience.’

On Sunday, Fatboy Slim revealed his ex wife Zoe Ball saved him from alcoholism when she threatened to leave him unless he got sober.

The superstar DJ, whose real name is Norman Cook, was married to Zoe for 17 years and the pair have remained close friends.

Norman has now revealed just how influential the TV and radio star, 55, was on him at the height of his alcohol struggles. 

Norman, 62, checked into rehab in 2009, ten years into his marriage, and has revealed his wake up call came when Zoe quietly confronted him. 

‘That was my wake-up moment,’ he recalled. ‘There had been tons of people shouting at me before, but it was whispered very quietly in the end.’ 

Reflecting on his recovery during an appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, he said he realised when he was in recovery that he had sought help ‘just in time.’ 

Fatboy Slim says his ex wife Zoe Ball saved him from alcholism after she threatened to leave him unless he got sober (pictured in 2001)

Norman, 62, checked into rehab in 2009, ten years into his marriage, and has revealed his wake up call came when Zoe quietly confronted him

‘It’s like a parasite,’ he added of alcoholism. ‘It protects its own. It knows that if you quit, it won’t have anywhere to live anymore, so it will do things to you to keep you.’

‘Probably the last year of my drinking, I wasn’t really enjoying it, and things were starting to fall off in my life.’ 

‘No, absolutely not,’ he said when asked whether becoming sober had been straightforward. ‘Probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I couldn’t have done it without going to rehab.’

‘I needed someone to bash into my head for a month. You know, “you’ll die, and you’ll be in misery if you don’t stop doing this”.’

Six-time Grammy nominee Norman still struggled after coming out of treatment, admitting he was terrified to perform without a drink.  

‘For the first five shows, I was so paralysed and rigid with fear, I couldn’t dance, and I couldn’t enjoy it,’ he said. ‘I was thinking: “What are you actually doing? Why are you going to play that record next? And why are they going to react to it?”‘

He said a ‘beautiful night in Japan’ helped him to overcome his fears as the crowd were ‘just really excitable’, and he realised his job was about making the crowd happy. ‘Everything sort of fitted into place,’ he explained.

Zoe and Norman began their romance in 1997 after they met in Ibiza and they married two years later at Babington House in Somerset. 

‘That was my wake-up moment,’ he recalled. ‘There had been tons of people shouting at me before, but it was whispered very quietly in the end’ (pictured on their wedding day in 1999) 

After welcoming son Woody in 2000, they split briefly in 2003 when it emerged she had an affair with a close friend of her husband’s DJ Dan Peppe.

Following the revelation Norman said he still loved Zoe and would take her back, as long as she promised never to see Peppe again. 

The Praise You hitmaker confessed at the time: ‘I still love her. If you love someone you’ll forgive them.’

They reconciled and welcomed daughter Nelly in 2010. However in September 2016 they announced their official separation. In a joint statement, the pair wrote: ‘With great sadness we are announcing that we have separated.’

Opening up on her ‘painful’ divorce earlier this year, Zoe confessed: ‘You try everything and then think this is not working.

‘The anticipation of just coming out with it and saying to your partner “right it’s the time”. It’s so scary because it’s overwhelming on all fronts, you’re worrying about the kids, you’re worrying about your partner, you’re worrying about you and how it will all work out.

‘Something I can tell you from personal experience is, yes it is a lot to go through but you will come out the other side of it.’