Born in 1938, Johnny Ball began his career as a Butlin\u2019s Redcoat and stand-up comedian before presenting the BBC\u2019s Playschool in 1967. He went on to write and present more than 20 factual shows popularising maths, including the Emmy- and BAFTA-winning Think of a Number.<\/p>\n
He has one daughter, BBC<\/a> broadcaster Zoe<\/a>, 54, from his first marriage, and two sons, Nick, 48, and Dan, 46, from his second marriage to Dianne. The couple live in Buckinghamshire.<\/p>\n Best childhood memory?<\/p>\n When I was about seven or eight, my parents took me to a pub in Bristol during the Second World War. A fellow came up and said, \u201cI\u2019m going to teach you how the Russians do multiplication,\u201d and I was fascinated. I was hooked on maths forever. All the books and TV shows about numbers that followed stemmed from that moment.<\/p>\n The other thing I remember is my dad, who was a very funny man, stealing a yard-long ceramic sewage pipe from work \u2013 by actually wearing it under a gabardine mac that was three sizes too big for him \u2013 and turning it into an umbrella stand. We moved to Bolton in 1949, but I don\u2019t think my parents were ever as happy again as they were in Bristol.<\/p>\n Best day of your life?<\/p>\n I was performing in Blackpool and, at the time, I was married to my first wife, but the marriage was a mess. It was non-existent. I was on the pier when a fortune teller called Madame Prospero asked me to take her picture, which I did. Then she said, \u201cI\u2019ll give you a palm reading,\u201d and told me, \u201cYou\u2019ve got two women in your life.\u201d I said, \u201cYou mean my wife and my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Zoe?\u201d and she said, \u201cNo. Two women. You\u2019re at a crossroads, and this is the best hand I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. Your career goes on and on, but it\u2019s all down to the decision about a woman you make now.\u201d<\/p>\n I said, \u201cI\u2019ve no idea what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d Then I spotted the compere\u2019s assistant in a show by the pier, and it hit me from 30 yards. She invited me to a party the following night, and that was it. Dianne and I have now been married for 50 years. I got it wrong the first time and Zoe suffered because of that, but then we got it right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born in 1938, Johnny Ball began his career as a Butlin\u2019s Redcoat and stand-up comedian before presenting the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[243,96,655,128,159742,5438,3133,176424,56,54,55,2853],"class_list":["post-502887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-bbc","tag-entertainment","tag-lifestyle","tag-music","tag-other-lifestyle","tag-standard","tag-television","tag-the-best-and-worst-of","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-zoe-ball"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}