Greatest Hits Radio makes no secret of the fact that a central pillar of its identity is in plundering BBC Radio 2 of its presenters – and its listeners.

Perhaps, years ago, there was a little bit of cursory evasion, about it being a place for a certain demographic who liked a certain type of music. But since Ken Bruce’s defection in 2023, a tectonic plate shift that shook the foundations of New Broadcasting House and ignited talk of “crises” and “brain drains” and ravens in towers, the station stopped bothering to pretend it was doing something radical or different and just let its success speak for itself, as with increasing inevitability more Beeb-weary DJs and more evangelistic listeners left “the other station” and never looked back.

Which is how we find Zoe Ball’s new afternoon show promoted with the distinctly un-BBC tag line: “They might have Cox, but we’ve got Ball”. It sounds both like vindication and a threat.

The announcement that Ball was to join Greatest Hits in July – the same week Sara Cox made her energising debut in Ball’s former Radio 2 breakfast slot – did not come as much of a surprise. She had left her Saturday afternoon Radio 2 show in December, had struggled balancing her family commitments with the demands of the in the months before she left that in 2024, and she had spoken on her podcast with Jo Whiley earlier this year – with her usual candour and vulnerability – about the “seven stages of grief and rejection” she experienced after not getting the job hosting .

She has of course been nothing but gracious about the BBC and her former station (for all her “ladette” history, she has always been an effusive personality), but there had just been the air of a rut about her – the suggestion that she felt overdue some kind of change. “I’ve tidied out the loft, I’d done all my runs to the tip. The garden is OK and I am slightly going a little bit mad,” she told this weekend.

Greatest Hits, for the listener at least, is the opposite of change. Ball’s show comes after Bruce’s – “I’m so thrilled to be his radio neighbour once again” – and before Simon Mayo’s; it is punctuated with trailers for programmes from people like Paul Gambaccini, and one caller phoned in to point out that its title, Zoe Ball in the Afternoon, must be an homage to the late Steve Wright who was “always there, and I’m sure you’re going to carry that enthusiasm on”. Greatest Hits, in other words, is what Radio 2 sounded like until about five years ago.

And so Ball sounds exactly as you expect her to: maternal, relatable, reassuring, relentlessly positive and totally at ease around an A-list guest, the first of whom was Hugh Jackman. She was inundated with well-wishing, conspiratorial callers delighted that she has at last joined their club, which must have calmed her nerves (when 4pm rolled around she said she was a “bit sweaty”, and that she might actually sleep that night) and seemed to marvel at the playlist – which is good enough to offset any irritation from adverts, which I stopped noticing after a while.

After her opening track, Kiki Dee’s “I’ve Got the Music in Me”, she said with some relief “they really do play the best tunes around here,” and given Abba, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, America, Bryan Ferry and Everything But the Girl followed, it was impossible to argue.

Relief, I imagine, is what most ex-Radio 2 presenters probably feel once they get behind the Greatest Hits decks. Cox sounded invigorated and in command when she launched her Radio 2 this summer, and she had to: the stakes were high, as the BBC fights to prevent its listeners from fleeing to commercial stations. But no such pressure hangs over the DJs on Greatest Hits, who I understand are very well remunerated (though Ball had been the BBC’s second-highest earner) and do not bear the responsibility of preserving the future of the BBC or fulfilling its charter or representing its values or proving they are worth the licence fee.

They don’t have to move with the times. They don’t have to innovate. They don’t have to appeal to new generations. They don’t even have to play any new music. Not doing that, in fact, is exactly what has made the station so formidable.

Ball doesn’t sound like a woman unleashed on Greatest Hits – she sounds at ease. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable, it is another reminder that a “home” and community is still there for listeners who feel that endless change and schedule shake-ups and retirements and deaths and defections have left Radio 2 a strange and different place. I’m afraid the BBC probably should be worried.

‘Zoe Ball in the Afternoon’ is on Greatest Hits Radio on weekdays from 1-4pm