Breakfast is served!
No stranger to television and radio, Sara Cox has been grafting since the 90s. Now, she’s reaping the rewards as the new host of Radio 2’s coveted morning slot
Sophia Spring for Radio Times
- Emma Cox
The Sara Cox Breakfast Show is on Monday-Friday on Radio 2 from 6.30am. Add it to your collection
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"Hiya, y'alright?”, asks Sara Cox when we meet at a café near the Radio 2 studios in London for RT’s photoshoot and interview. She later confesses she wasn’t sure if I was a customer or from Radio Times, but it’s testament to her genuine love for people that she greets everyone in the same manner, including listeners who ring in to the teatime slot she’s been hosting for the past seven and a half years.
We’re talking ahead of her move to the Breakfast Show, one of the biggest jobs in broadcasting with over 6 million listeners, more than the entire population of Scotland. The promotion means she’ll be interviewing Hollywood greats such as Tom Hanks, who has been announced as the first guest on her launch show.
Yet if the glam new job has gone to Cox’s head, you can’t tell. She’s happily waving a fry-up around for our photographer with a tea towel slung over her shoulder, and when a waitress asks for it back, Bolton-born Cox cheekily tells her, “No, I’m using it”.
Sara Cox in the studio. BBC/Comic Relief 2025/ Daniel Loveday
She insists she won’t be changing her down-to-earth style just because she’s rubbing shoulders with the great and the good. “It’s lovely asking big guests about scripts and music videos, but not everyone can relate to that,” the 51-year-old presenter says. “I want to bring the megastars into the Radio 2 world. Our listeners care about dogs, holidays, gardening and potatoes, so I’ll ask my guests if they’ve ever been in a motorhome or their preferred way of cooking a potato. And the real stars are still going to be the listeners.”
Her listeners will be glad to hear it. She’s known for such audience-participating staples as Kids in the Car, Totally Tea-Voted, and the flagship All Request Friday, elements of which she’ll be bringing to the Breakfast Show while embracing the possibilities offered by the prestigious slot.
I want to bring megastars into the Radio 2 world – I’ll be asking guests about dogs, holidays, gardening and potatoes
“People share their deepest feelings on air with me, which is a massive privilege,” she says. “I want to carry that on in some form. We’re starting the new show with a feature where we ring someone first thing in the morning. I love the jeopardy of that. I’m nosy. Sometimes you pull a thread and before you know it, you discover the 75-year-old lady you’re talking to rides a moped. I’ve become very close to my listeners.”
Cox was announced as the new Breakfast Show DJ after previous host Scott Mills was sacked over historic allegations of sexual offences against a teenage boy. Interestingly, Mills and Cox have history: in 2004, Mills covered Cox’s maternity leave from her late afternoon slot on Radio 1 before taking the position permanently, and this year, Cox took over Eurovision duties from Mills after his sacking.
When I raise the thorny subject, Cox is understandably reluctant to talk about it and says politely, “I understand why you’re asking about Scott, but I don’t know any more than what’s been in the media, so I’m not commenting further.” It’s the only time in our interview that she flat-out doesn’t answer a question. In general she’s as warm, witty and open as you’d expect; but on serious subjects she’s more measured and thoughtful than her on-air persona might belie.
Cox on 90s feature The Girlie Show. Channel 4
In fact, the day after our slightly rushed interview, she calls me to chat further, explaining that she has more to say about her career and the 90s when she first became famous. “I’ve been thinking about our conversation and I wanted to say that as a woman, if you’ve worked hard and grafted, it’s important to recognise that. I don’t think women should put every-thing down to luck. Men don’t talk about their careers like that. In the 90s and noughties I was flying to New York to interview Eminem, flying to Miami to meet Missy Elliott, and having experiences I could never have imagined. I need to own that more.”
Cox started out as a model before landing a job in her early 20s as a presenter on Channel 4’s The Girlie Show, an archetypal 90s confection that arose through the decade’s love for so-called “ladettes” – women who were unapologetically confident and funny. She spearheaded the movement along with the likes of best mate Zoe Ball and The Big Breakfast’s Denise Van Outen, all of whom posed for “lads’ mags” and were often pictured partying.
Despite her initial hesitation at talking about the ladette culture in our interview – she is, after all, a married mother-of-three now – Cox admits, “It was a completely wild, mad, fun time, and I had a blast. There were ups and downs: between the first and second series of The Girlie Show I was signing on. I never thought that was my career sorted. I had no idea I’d still be doing it 30 years later.”
I’m going to Tony Blackburn the heck out of this job! I’ll be here in my 80s
I’m fascinated to understand how she made the transition from that ballsy, in-your-face era of the 90s to her position now as one of the BBC’s safest pair of hands. After all, many of the women who were alongside Cox for the journey haven’t been as successful: Ball did Radio 2’s Breakfast Show until December 2024, but Van Outen’s TV appearances are more sporadic, while Cox’s The Girlie Show co-host Sarah Cawood recently posted a tearful Instagram post about feeling “redundant” after her career came to a halt post-children.
How did Cox manage to stay so relevant? “There was definitely a period where I had to persuade TV commissioners that I could be warm, funny and kind,” she admits. “Women in the 90s were often portrayed as wild party girls and there was a bit of shame attached to that, as if we shouldn’t have been out having a good time.
“Moving to Radio 2 was a massive step. I kept asking for meetings and pitching ideas until eventually I got my foot in the door. Doing the Children in Need version of Sewing Bee led to The Great Pottery Throw Down. That felt like a breakthrough because people saw me being myself – funny, kind and human. From there, BBC One and Two seemed to say, ‘Oh, right...’”
Cox was part of the Eurovision 2026 team. BBC
I don’t ask Cox the “How do you juggle motherhood and work?” question, because it feels misogynistic, but we inevitably get onto the subject: partly because Cox talks about her children fondly and often, and partly because seismic changes have often happened in her career while she’s been on maternity leave. “I think it’s hard for every woman when she takes maternity leave and then tries to return to a very competitive industry. Looking back, though, the quieter periods of my career were actually a blessing because I got to spend so much time with my children when they were little.
“I was in the thick of school-run life, doing terrible five-point turns in the middle of the road like every other exhausted parent. I don’t miss those days, exactly, but I’m glad I had them, and I look back at them with enormous fondness.”
Cox’s children – Lola, 22, from her first marriage to DJ Jon Carter, and Isaac, 18 and Renee, 16, with husband Ben Cyzer, an advertising executive – are old enough to be quite self-sufficient: when Isaac goes to university this autumn, only Renee will be living at home, so the shift in radio slots won’t have much of an impact on home life.
“I did text the kids last night from bed because they were messing around,” she says. “You don’t want to shush your children when they’re laughing, but I also had to tell them not to eat the boiled eggs I’d prepared for my breakfast along with a nectarine, a filter coffee and oats!
“For our pilot shows I’ve been up at 5am, out of the door by 5.30. I can do my make-up in eight minutes. It looks like someone’s thrown handfuls of make-up at me, but hopefully by 8.30 I’ll look less like Aunt Sally as it slides off my face.
“It all went very well and I’m one of those annoying ‘get up early and embrace the day’ types anyway. Ask me again in a week and I’ll probably be turning up in pyjamas!”
Women shouldn’t put their success down to luck – men don’t
There’s no need to worry about hang-overs with the new early starts, either. Ben is teetotal and Cox has slowly become less interested in drinking (“I think I used up all my drink tokens back in the day”), although she did have a “lovely” spicy margarita on holiday in February.
She’s fit as a flea, too, as we saw last year when she completed her Children in Need challenge of running five marathons in five days, raising £11.7 million.
“I should get that number tattooed somewhere,” she says. “It’s astonishing, how many children that will help. It really resonated with people. There was a particular connection with women my age because I was crying and it hurt so much, but they could see I wasn’t going to give up. Even now, it gives me goosebumps.
Cox during her Children in Need challenge last year. The Sunday Times/News Licensing
“It taught me that I’m stronger than I realised. It’s difficult sometimes as a woman to say, ‘I’m proud of myself,’ but I am. Physically, though, I was a mess. My feet were swollen like balloons. I could only wear Crocs.”
In between charity challenges, DJing, presenting TV shows and motherhood, Cox is also an author and podcast host, yet still she finds time to spend with her menagerie: three dogs and a horse called Nellie. She talks so fondly about her animals and growing up on a farm that it seems inevitable she’ll buy herself a plot of land one of these days.
“I could never be too far from London because of work,” she says. “And I’m not planning to retire any time soon. I’m going to Tony Blackburn the heck out of this job! I’ll be here in my 80s.
“But having my own farm is very much the dream. I’m happiest in my riding gear and scruffy clothes. I absolutely see myself one day with windswept hair, rescue sheep, a retired Nellie living her best life, and maybe a wonky donkey and some laying hens named after pop stars – Whitney, Prince and a cockerel called Stormzy.”
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For now, though, it’s all about launching the Breakfast Show, and there seems to be no hint of nerves, only excitement and a determination to do the best job possible for the listeners and for herself. “It’s the dream show and something I’ve wanted for a long time,” she says. “There will be a few butterflies on the day but I’m not nervous. Now that my children are at a great age, it’s the perfect time to take the next step in my career. It feels like a golden time.”
Authors
Emma Cox
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