Experience is Everything with Saga is a podcast and Susie Dent seems to have taken over from Dame Jenni Murray (who died last month).

The episode below (April 2026) is with Johnny Ball and I would imagine only Brits of a certain age would remember him.

His daughter, Zoe Ball, is more famous nowadays and this popped into my feed because of a mention of Jimmy in this Instagram post. If you don’t want to watch the full chat (this conversation snippet comes up about 37.50 minutes into the podcast) you can read about it below. The Instagram clip doesn’t make much sense as it’s had a strange crop.

Johnny said when his kids were teenagers, he was doing panto and the only night off you get is Christmas Eve and they would have a party with about 150 people attending.

Years later Jimmy told Johnny he “loved his punch” and Johnny said he didn’t think they’d met. Jimmy explained that he had been one of the teens at the party and said Johnny was always in the kitchen and Zoe would be there with the jug (which sounds like “drug” in the video).

Johnny said the kids would have been “17 or 18” (making that around 1989-90) and that they would go to the pub afterwards and only have 1 drink because they’d loaded up on punch.

In this 2019 episode of Zoe’s Radio2 (R2) breakfast show she’d reminisced with her guest (Jimmy) that they’d grown up in the same village and that she’d been in the same year (at school) with his older brother, Colin.

Unfortunately, it’s not available to listen to any more.