Rylan Clark hit back live on his Radio 2 show over the weekend after Sally Boazman joked that he was difficult, turning a light studio exchange into a pointed back-and-forth that listeners heard in real time.
The clash came as Boazman, better known to Radio 2 listeners as Sally Traffic, was preparing to deliver her news segment. Clark asked her, “What’s your problem?” and she answered, “I don’t have a problem.” She then said he had been rude about her to Ellie, prompting him to reply, “You wasn’t, you liar, you said I was difficult.” Boazman pushed back: “I said, ‘You could be difficult’.” Clark shot back, “Well that’s like saying, ‘It could be you’, it’s not the lottery.” Boazman laughed that the week she won the lottery, he would never see her again, and Clark said he was praying for her numbers to come in.
The joke worked because both presenters knew the off-air history behind it. Boazman had said she was not calling Clark impossible, only that he “could be difficult,” a small distinction that gave the exchange its sting. Clark was already in the middle of a busy publicity run after appearing on ITV’s The Assembly, the interview series where famous faces face unfiltered questions from autistic and neurodivergent interviewers.
That appearance put his private life back in the spotlight. Asked by a student, “When you told your husband you cheated on him, he divorced you. Is honesty always the best policy?” Clark answered, “Yeah, I think it is.” He said he was “okay admitting I’m in the wrong, because actually I don’t deal well with guilt and I don’t deal well with secrets,” adding that it “made me so ill, like so ill.” He also said, “I’m glad it happened” and, of his former husband Dan Neal, “Do you know, I never think of him.” Clark and Neal split in 2021 after six years of marriage.
Boazman then shifted the tone again, saying she had endured a difficult week after a foot injury sustained while out shopping. Clark quickly moved from teasing to sympathy, a reminder that the pair’s sparring sits inside a working relationship that still has room for warmth. It is also why the live exchange landed: the joke was sharp, but neither presenter let it turn sour, and Radio 2 listeners got a glimpse of the chemistry that keeps those moments on air.
The unresolved question is not whether they can trade jokes. It is what happened in the off-air conversation with Ellie that made Boazman say Clark was difficult in the first place. For now, that remains the bit listeners did not hear.
