“And it suddenly disappeared,” Johnny Ball says gleefully after a short pause. “The statuette disappeared and nobody could find it. It was stuck down the back of my dress suit trousers!”
He delivers the story with an endearing grin and signature comic timing that has been honed over an entire career. Ball is referring to the time in the late 70s that he took the BAFTA he’d just won for ‘Think of a Number’ home with him and kept it for a fortnight when he was meant to give it back.
He incredulously remarks: “All those masks and all those statuettes that they win year after year are all stuck in bloody cupboards at the BBC.”
Ball comes across affably and personably, as I ask him questions about his life and career following the recent release of his memoir, Johnny Ball: My Previous Life in Comedy. At 86 years old, he assures me of his impeccable health despite a complaint of gout in his little finger. I am inclined to believe him as he remains animated throughout the interview, telling me stories and imparting wisdom with vigour and clarity.
Growing up in wartime and post-war Bristol and spending a stretch of his teenage years in Bolton, Ball made his name as a touring stand-up comedian before finding national fame and acclaim as a writer and presenter of children’s television shows for the BBC.
What strikes me from the interview is the value that he places on relationships with key individuals in his life, particularly his father Danny Ball.
Would his “gag a minute fella” father made it as a comedian? Ball responds without pause with the single word: “Unquestionably”. He illustrates the mutual care he and his father shared with an anecdote of his father moving him and his mother to tears with a rendition of ‘Shake Hands with a Millionaire’ at a wedding. Ball says “I was the most valuable thing in his life because I was a child and he was broke – at one point he had next to nothing.”
Ball credits his father with inspiring him to become a comedian at the age of 11, along with the trips to Blackpool he would take him on.
It was also in Blackpool where the direction of Ball’s life was irrevocably altered. A a fortune teller informed him he had another woman in his life, which he instantly denied. But, Ball says, “three quarters of an hour later, I saw Di.” It was Di who became his wife, and mother to his sons.
“It was magic.”
Ball describes himself as “lucky” to have found his soulmate in Di. But he clarifies: “Soulmates is not the luck of finding the perfect person. It’s the luck of moulding each other to each other’s requirements.”
When I ask Ball about the extent of his formal education, two O-levels, he says “I don’t consider me a failure in anything.” Ball recalls falling behind in school after missing a lot of time due to being impaled on a bush and nearly dying as a teenager.
In a sense, the education system of the time failed him. But Ball is not bitter at all, saying: “Everything you get wrong in education is reparable.” It was later in life when Ball’s love and talent for mathematics and science became apparent in his educational television programmes.
He says of this education in further life: “Once the chips are down and you say, ‘I’m going to do this’, if you get your mind and your act and your energy together, there’s nothing to stop you doing it.” This is wisdom Ball has clearly lived by throughout his life, and shows no signs of drifting away from.
Ball has just released the first of his two memoirs Johnny Ball: My Previous Life in Comedy, which tells the story of his life from his birth in 1938 to his burgeoning television career in the early 1970s. It is a humorous and candid story of a rich and colourful life well-lived.
Johnny Ball – My Previous Life in Comedy is published by The Book Guild.
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