Zoe Ball has revealed she was left in tears last week, after discovering that her car had been broken into. The 54-year-old had just left The One Show studio, when she noticed her car window had been smashed, and her bag had been stolen.
Reflecting on the incident, the BBC Radio 2 star issued advice on how to avoid and cope with such a situation, as she blamed herself for leaving her bag on the front seat.
Speaking to her co-star Jo Whiley on their Dig It podcast, she said: “Someone had smashed the front window of my car, that’s never happened to me before.”
Upon discovering the crime, Zoe said she was a “bit frozen” and wasn’t sure what to do at first.
After then searching around in her car, she realised she had a long festival-themed poncho and decided to put it to good use.
“I wrapped [it] around the smashed door [and] slammed it tight and was like, ‘Right, okay, I’m probably going to have to drive from London to Brighton at 30 miles an hour’.
“But do you know what? I got up to 60 and it was very loud!”.
Zoe said at the time, she had her podcast co-star on the radio, which was followed by Bob Harris’ show.
“I’ve never heard the country show quite so loud in my ear,” she laughed. “But you both got me home safely, thank you.”
Reflecting on the incident in hindsight, Zoe believes it may not have happened if her bag wasn’t on the front seat.
“I’m not very practical,” she added. “Sometimes when things like that happen, I’m like, ‘Right, oh yes, what do I do? I don’t have any masking tape’. Anyway, they didn’t get anything valuable, so it was fine.”
Asked if she felt quite wounded by the unexpected moment, Zoe insisted she was and added: “I got in and I had a massive cry.
“Do you know what I did? I did a stupid thing, I was so busy running into The One Show with my suits and my bag and everything.
“And we were going to do a picture with our Spotify picture [team], which was amazing, and I left a bag on the front seat.
“Big no, no in London, idiot. Luckily nothing in it except my diary.”
Addressing her tears once more, she joked: “It was good, I love a big blub. The ones where you wake up in the morning and your face is a bit swollen and you’re like, ‘Well I’m glad I got that out’.”
In response, Jo said she too had been a victim of a crime in the capital, after getting her phone snatched.
“Just a boy on a bike just literally snatched it from my hand,” she shared with her co-star. “And then you having something [happen] like this, it’s just so disappointing that people would do that to another person.”