Sara Cox reveals Patsy Kensit's 'classy' response to a cruel TV jibe she made in her early career

Sara Cox has said she has a lifelong respect for after hearing her 'classy' response to a cruel jibe she made about her live on TV. 

The Radio 2 star, who is about to take over the station's coveted Breakfast Show slot, has been reflecting on her three decades of fame, and how much her career – and the media landscape – has evolved.

Sara started her broadcast career after landing an audition for The Girlie Show in the mid-Nineties. She was just 21 at the time and had been focusing on modelling after being scouted during a chance meeting in Paris.

After calling the producers every day, Sara landed a presenting role on the outlandish show, where each week she would nominate a 'W***** of the Week' and then explain why they deserved the accolade. One week she called out Patsy, telling the camera: 'Your lips are like your knees. They never meet.'

'Shortly after that I saw [Kensit's husband at the time] backstage at Top of the Pops and he wasn't overly impressed with me,' she has now admitted. 'I was quietly devastated because I loved Oasis.'

It was a different story when she ran into Patsy herself though, as she told The Sunday Times Magazine: 'I went to Nobu and Patsy Kensit was there and she waved me over.'

'She was so friendly and classy. It was either the ultimate kill-it-with-kindness – or she hadn't seen the telly or she just thought I was young and silly and who cares? I've always really respected her after that.'

She explained that she would never dream of saying anything like that today but she doesn't regret the show that kickstarted her broadcast career and allowed her to leave home in Bolton.

'I wrote my own monologues and I obviously liked getting a laugh, which is something I'd always gone for as the youngest of five. People expect me to recoil and to be embarrassed but I wouldn't be sitting here now if it wasn't for that show.'

She is also not ashamed of the ladette label, awarded to her and pals like Zoe Ball during the hedonism of the nineties and early noughties.  

'We went out and had fun but we were still ambitious, conscientious people,' she pointed out. 'When I speak to women who are 40 now, teenagers then, they thought it was fantastic that we had a voice and we could just be ourselves and have no shame. It was always twisted to be about downing pints, which it never was for me.' 

Next up for Sara is the biggest job in radio, taking over the Radio 2 Breakfast Show next week following the axing of her friend Scott Mills. 

It was announced in April the presenter, 51, would take over the Breakfast Show after Scott was sacked when it was discovered he had been the subject of allegations of 'serious sexual offences' against a teenage boy under 16. 

Sara and Scott have been friends and BBC colleagues for three decades, since they both started at Radio 1 within a year of one another in the late Nineties. Sara was a guest at Scott and husband Sam's 2024 wedding.

In May, the Daily Mail's Katie Hind revealed Scott is suing the BBC after it axed him.

Scott believes he was unfairly dismissed and his legal team at the London-based firm Level Law has been corresponding with the corporation, his employers for 28 years, for weeks.

Friends of Scott believe he was used as a 'scapegoat' by the BBC's then outgoing director-general Tim Davie, who took a zero-tolerance approach after a string of recent scandals relating to Huw Edwards, Gregg Wallace and Jermaine Jenas.