The Herald - Porter house blues

Fame, fortune, and celebrity boyfriends; naked notoriety on the House of Commons... just when it seemed you knew everything about Gail Porter she lays bare much more: the 'soul-mate' relationship with her mother and how her parents' separation has coloured her own views of marriage

It is a cold, crisp day in Perthshire, and Gail Porter is emotionally drained and exhausted. She has just flown up from London for a rare weekend in Scotland which she will spend with her beloved mum, Sandra, in the lap of luxury at Gleneagles Hotel. They're in thorough need of being fussed over, sighs Gail, and so they have come to a place where they could just conceivably be fussed to death.

None the less, she looks delightfully rumpled today in the kind of manner only ever truly achieved by the hip or the famous. She has her chopped, corn-blonde hair brushed flat behind pixie ears, and is wearing a denim jacket over worn combats that are decadently fashionable, and, doubtless, very expensive. She is the liveliest of company, picking delicately at a plate of strawberries and quaffing from a glass of Chardonnay.

It is a weird, weird experience interviewing Gail Porter in the presence of her mother, because later Gail will reveal her strange attitude towards marriage and having children - both tainted, it seems, by the effect her parents' marriage bust-up had on her. Then there's her feelings towards men, fame, money, and the very close relationship she and her mother have enjoyed, and which bizarrely only really began to blossom after Sandra and husband, Craig, split up. There is also the price she has paid for being a winner in the greasy flagpole climb.

It's more than a year since she posed naked and flashed her bottom for GQ magazine and caused a reaction broadly interpreted as a 50-50 blend of hate/notoriety when her naked image was projected onto the House of Commons in a publicity stunt by FHM.

It might only have been a flickering light reflected on a wall, however she is still being criticised for it.

She'll be 29 in three weeks' time. Sometimes it is like talking with one of the generation of young old maids. Yet she is the liveliest company. She also has a sense of humour which contains that grating undertone of contempt. For example, I express a tongue-partially-in-cheek theory about the attraction she felt for her former boyfriend - that Stonehenge punk Keith Flint, of the band The Prodigy, famed for his devil's horns hairstyle and courting controversy with hit songs Smack My Bitch Up and Firestarter.

I jokingly remark that falling in love must have been like a magnetic meeting of the "bolted ones" (Gail has had her left breast pierced with a metal bolt, and Keith has bolts through his tongue and nose). She fires back sarcastically with the quick riposte: "Yeah, that's it - a connection of bolts, we interlocked one evening!"

Events that week had confirmed her status at the height of her profession. At Maxim magazine's Women of the Year lunch at London's Park Lane Hotel, she won Best TV Presenter, beating Gabby Yorath, Donna Air, Cat Deeley and Emma Leddon.

She had also been named as the replacement for out-going presenter Sara Cox on Channel 4's Big Breakfast show, in which she gets to cavort on a bed with celebrities and boy bands. She also fronts BBC1's Top of the Pops, hosts Channel 5's popular film review show and will shortly present yet another new series about the internet, for C4.

Pretty good going for somebody who started off as a runner for In Video and then Picardy Television in Edinburgh. TV presenters such as Ms Porter have much in common with professional tennis players. They start young, they're relentlessly ambitious, and they stay focused. And so, in order to chill out before she begins a three-month stint of 3am rises for the breakfast show, she is being waited on and pampered in one of those hotels where the ugly aspects of life have been excluded.

Gail and Sandra have come here to enjoy the quiet elegance and the politeness of its inhabitants, many of them wallet-heavy tourists, others professional people.

When I arrive I find her perched with her feet up on a chair in a window seat at a far corner of the bar, looking like a cross between a cheerleader, surf-chick and occasional model for a teen magazine, though her height (5ft 2) would prevent her pursuing a catwalk career. A touchy subject, her height. It was the first thing latched on to when Ms Porter first began to feel the thud of the critics' pen between the shoulder blades.

"Some people can be extremely nice about you and other people can be extremely detrimental towards you," she harumphs. "I got called a dwarf. I am not very good at handling criticism yet." She does not grudge the critics their sad amusements, but wishes they'd stick to the facts. "I know that when I first started reading the negative things in the press, they made up things. That Gail's manager sacked her. Which was untrue because I left my manager. Or 'Gail's Lost Out To Donna On The Big Breakfast'. Some papers managed to get a whole page out of this. Negative press I don't like. Obviously you don't like it if people think you are not plain nice. You don't like hearing nasty things about yourself, really. Nobody does. Some people can handle it and some people can't. I am not very good at handling it."

But what does she expect when she was so savvy about exploiting her sexuality? It was her decision to pose for that provocative series of photos in GQ and FHM. A cynical gamble in making the crossover from children's TV presenter on Fully Booked to programmes with more adult appeal. She explains: "When I finished Fully Booked I got asked to go along to GQ to do a photo shoot which was supposed to be a fashion thing. I ended up doing that famous picture of me lying down on the ground in a blue room and showing my bottom off. They asked me when I got there, do you fancy doing it? I did think I'd quite like to have a picture like that of myself to keep. Yeah, I fancy that. Yeah, why not. I did it and then everything went kind of mad after that. It was shock horror, children's-television-presenter-has-a-bottom shock. It was right after the Richard Bacon scandal with the drugs and Blue Peter, and I think the tabloids were out to get the children's TV presenters and to get at the BBC."

Just how badly the shrink-wrapped little sculpted buttocks shots were received in some quarters could perhaps be measured by Gail's brief appearance to welcome The Corrs on stage at Wembley Arena during the Net Aid concert last summer. Ringing out over the cheers from the heaving goulash of bodies at the front of the stage came much louder jeering directed at Gail.

The experience at the concert would have taken the starch out of lesser mortals. But Gail says: "There is a spontaneity about a crowd. I don't remember a lot about it. It was like being in shock. 'You are on in 30 seconds,' they said. I thought: 'I can't go out there.' Everyone was in such high spirits. I don't think they would have cared if it was me or Eddie the Eagle. Anyway, that wasn't a good place to measure popularity."

Just then, a very attentive hotel waiter arrives with trays of food, gesturing to the one with no animal produce (Gail's a veggie and floss-thin to boot). There's avocado, plum tomatoes, wild mushrooms and asparagus. "Err, could I actually have a plate of fruit," she interjects. "I am allergic to oil so that is not going to be much use to me. I get a rash. No banana, thanks; yeuch. Strawberries, yes."

Which seems like a good point to change course and raise this mother-daughter bonding exercise which only happened belatedly four years ago when Sandra, 52, and husband, Craig, separated. So it was a get-to-know-you thing on the basis of a daughter needing to protect a discomforted mother?

"When I was growing up we weren't that close," says Gail. "It was typical mum, dad, son and daughter. When my dad and mum split up, it was like Ab Fab. I became the mother of my mum. I suddenly wanted to protect my mum. She had been married for 27 years." Protect her against what, precisely? "Against being on her own. She'd had 27 years of being with someone which is something that I have never experienced and I doubt very much I will experience. You get married at 21 and then suddenly everything is topsy turvy. I wanted to spoil her and look after her."

At this point Sandra, who has been dutifully keeping mum while pretending to be buried in the hotel's leisure activities brochure, pipes up: "I quite enjoyed it, all the attention." Gail continues: "From knowing a mum who was raising you when you were younger, taking you to your classes and doing a mum's thing to now discovering that you have actually got a best friend there as well. You can be there for each other. We communicate all the time. We are soul mates. I tell her everything."

Everything? "Oh yes," says Sandra. "We help each other." Gail: "That's why I wanted her to come on this weekend. I was just exhausted. I am absolutely flat-out busy. I was emotionally drained. That's why I said, well, you come with me.

"I knew that she wouldn't give me a hard time. She'd just be there. That I don't have to talk if I don't want to talk."

Does that mean it is harder when you have got to present your next beau for your mother's approval - that her expectations are much higher? You know the kind of thing: hey mom, I'd like you to meet Keith of The Prodigy; ignore the Frankenstein bolts, the misogynistic lyrics on his records and the There's Something About Mary hair gel, because, really, he is a nice bloke.

Gail says: "She accepts it. And gets on with it. I do the same with her. I am very lucky. That's why I phone her every day. I am just glad that we found that. So many people don't."

Though they are separated, Sandra still works with Craig in the building contractor's company they run together. "It's bloomin' weird if you ask me," says Gail. "I don't talk to my dad as much as my mum because my dad is not as open as my mum. My dad is very much 'well done, did you have a good day at work dear', hear what I want to hear and that will do me. I am absolutely delighted - not that their marriage didn't work out, that sounds awful. But when you are growing up and you know that they are not getting on very well and they are staying together for the sake of the kids. It wasn't bad. It just kind of happened. We get on great with both of them. It is more like a friendship now."

Although Gail's much publicised relationship with Keith is officially over after only five months, it was, at first, a liaison which she found a bit overwhelming. They were introduced by fellow presenter Sara Cox, whom Gail had met briefly through a few jobs and whose boyfriend is also in The Prodigy.

" 'You have got to meet my friend, Keith, you would just get on so well,' said Sara. You get that sort of thing from everybody in this industry," says Gail. "It was her boyfriend's birthday and she said Keith would like to take me to the party. Keith phoned and we went to the party together and we just got on like a house on fire. He is extremely ambitious, like me. He is not freaky at all. When he first walked in I thought, is this the same person? He is a lovely bloke. So normal. Down to earth. He has a passion for his work."

But with the relationship over, Gail has moved out of Keith's Essex mansion. She had moved in when she returned from the Maldives, where she had been reporting for Wish You Were Here?, only to find her West Hampstead flat had been burgled. "They nicked my TV, video, computer and car, which they used to drive to an estate and dumped it. Stuff they could sell easy. Photographs, personal things, everything was on the floor when I got back. I was in a massive amount of shock.

"They must have known whose flat it was when they saw the photographs. After the burglary, I phoned Keith. I ended up staying at his for ages but it wasn't convenient."

Now renting a flat amid the Bacchanalian delights of Soho, she notes: "I don't really know anything about long-term relationships because I have not been in one before."

Does that worry her mum? "No, I was in one," says Sandra. "For 27 years."

"Hence the reason I won't be in one, that's for sure," says Gail sourly. So her mum's matrimonial bust-up has been sufficient reason to put her off marriage for life?

"Yes, I have seen lots and lots of relationships just crumble," replies Gail. "Everybody seems to be divorced these days. That might be a tragic thing to say. All I am saying is that if you actually love someone that much and you want to be with them then you don't have to marry them."

Nor does she want children. "Just because society says I have got to have kids. I love kids but I don't want one. People are different. Mum is not getting grandchildren by me, there is not a hope in hell of her getting grandchildren.

"People just expect you to have children. Oh well, you are a woman, fall in love and have children, that's your job. I don't want to have kids. I am just happy doing my thing and I want to get on with it. The state the world is in at the minute I don't know if I want to be 20 years down the line looking back thinking, oh gosh, I have got to look after this kid who might hate me by then. It is not a bad thing."

Which leaves the way clear for Gail, a middle-class girl raised in Joppa, near Edinburgh, to complete her goal to become one of the top TV presenters in Britain and run her own production company. She has recently set up the company Heroine - "with an E", she corrects - and has written six major projects with partner Charlotte Wheeler, a producer friend.

"People were always saying we were very funny together, why don't you write something, so we did. People aren't going to want Gail Porter for ever.

If they don't, at least I have got something to go back on. It makes sense to have your own production company.

"It's not about money. I just wanted to get on. You do get paid well, yeah. The great thing is now that I can look after my friends and my family."

Given her sensible upbringing and education - Portobello High School, Media Production course at Watford College - and a career stretching ahead of her that could last 20 years or more, you wouldn't expect her to self-destruct in the traditional blizzard of booze or drugs. No, really. Mooning for the camera seems to have been her biggest mistake so far. Any regrets? "You must be joking. I am sitting in the Gleneagles Hotel living the life of Reilly. My little brother, Keith, works with adults with learning and physical disabilities.

"It makes you put this all into perspective. I am having a laugh. Maybe it is just because I am extremely annoying that you think I have been around longer than I have. But it is only three years since I quit Fully Booked.

"I am just a girl from Edinburgh. I've done what I wanted to do: got on TV. I'm having a great laugh doing my job and I don't want to change the way that I act for anybody."

Even as a child, she says, she had a fantasy of being on the telly. With her best pal, they played TV games like The Professionals. "I'd be riding on my bike and I'd be Bodie or Doyle, whatever, and we'd talk to one another on our walkie talkies. We did a lot of make-believe, except I just carried on, made it last for ever.

"You see - I am Dorothy. I am always in Kansas, mate. That's the frightening thing."