DJ and presenter Jo Whiley on how she's still getting home at 4am, her husband's health scare and why she thinks Monty Don is as cool as Mick Jagger.
If ever someone was a joyous role model in middle age, it’s Jo Whiley. In the run up to her 60th birthday in July, she sounds as enthusiastic as ever introducing both oldies and fledgling musicians on her Radio 2 slot.
And at the weekend, she’s often DJing up and down the country with her 90s Anthems shows, packing dance floors with people of all ages.
"I don’t get back until three or four in the morning after jumping up and down on stage all night – it’s like a Jane Fonda workout," she says.
"Recently, the morning after one, I said to my mum, 'I’m a bit stiff'. She went, 'Well, Joanne' – she’s my mum, so that’s what she calls me – 'I was retiring at your age, maybe it’s something you should think about'. I was like, 'Never going to happen!'"
Last year, she mourned the death of her friend and Radio 2 colleague Steve Wright, aged 69. Over the past five years, she and her husband Steve, who have four children aged between 32 and 16, have lost three close friends – one to Covid, one to cancer and one to a brain tumour.
"These were friends who were integral to our lives – we’d go on holidays and spend weekends with them – so losing them made a huge dent. There was a massive readjustment that I don’t think we’ve ever recovered from.
"They were incredibly fun people and the fact that they could be here one day and gone the next gave us that sense of, 'OK, we want to make sure we’re here for as long as possible and have as much fun as possible with the kids'"
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She and Steve have long been avid exercise fans, but they had a wake-up call five years ago when, during a routine check-up, Steve, 60, learned his cholesterol was very high with a rating of 7 millimoles per litre (above 5mmol/L is considered high).
"The doctors were saying he should maybe go on statins but Steve was really reluctant. He was desperate to do something more natural, so he completely cut out all the bad stuff in his diet, ditched the flapjacks and ready meals because you don’t think about the saturated fat in those, and he ate very, very healthily."
He also filled the fridge with Benecol drinks and spreads, which block absorption of cholesterol in the digestive tract.
"I used to see him necking these little pots all the time and was deeply cynical about it but then he managed to get his rating down to five. I was like, 'Oh, all right! It works!'"
"He doesn't give a monkey's about what anybody thinks of him. He's so happy within his own skin, he doesn't care if people have a negative opinion about him, because he knows what he does and does it well.
"Recently, he's been doing this gardening tour and I saw a picture of him on stage, standing there like Mick Jagger or Jarvis Cocker, commanding the stage, arms in the air, like a proper rock star. That's cool."
Of entering her seventh decade, she says: "It’s bizarre seeing that age and realising it applies to you, but you have to embrace it, although I’m definitely aware of aching a bit more."
Now she can’t wait to have grandchildren. "We were out recently with India and a friend of hers who’s got a baby and I swooped in. It just was so lovely to hold a baby again. No pressure, India!"
Jo is the official ambassador for Benecol’s Every Heart Deserves One campaign.
Benecol, the UK’s number one cholesterol-lowering food brand, is the only range of food containing the cholesterol-lowering ingredient, plant stanol ester.
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