Sky Digital Magazine - Funny Girl

Gail Porter is so full of energy she makes the rest of the world look like slow motion. She bounces into the room, positively fizzing with enthusiasm, talking at the kind of pitch and pace that's guaranteed to detach the hind legs from passing donkeys. With her infectious sense of fun and a laugh that rings out loudly and regularly, it's little wonder this elfin Scottish lass has been signed up to present all the thigh-slapping comedy programmes on the launch day of Paramount's spanking new all-day schedule.

"I've always been a hyper person,' says the fast-talking 29-year-old. "Sometimes my brain goes so fast that I think I'm going completely bonkers. Even when I'm sleeping, I'll wake up in the middle of the night and scribble ideas down. I'm always on the move, always in a hurry to do the next thing. I've been full to the brim with self-belief for as long as I can remember. As soon as I decided I was going to be a TV presenter, there was no stopping me."

Her seemingly unstoppable rise up the TV ladder began in the early Nineties. After taking a college course in media studies, she worked as a runner for a video company, as a tape operator in an edit suite and helped to produce some TV commerdals. She then wrote to a cable channel, cheekily suggesting that she could help present their coverage of the Edinburgh Festival. Surprise surprise - she got the job and sent the resulting tapes to every TV company she could think of. Commissions quickly followed and she became a regular fixture on kids' TV shows: presenting Disney's Great Cartoon Chase and Scratchy & Co before landing the main job on the BBC's kids' show Fully Booked.

Gail, however, had bigger fish to fry. She made no secret of the fact that she wanted to move on to more grown-up TV shows, and, to shake off her girl-next-door image, posed naked for a trio 0f men's magazines. This was followed by her widely publicised nipple-piercing. Then, to cap it all, one of her nude photographs was used as a publicity stunt by FHM magazine and flashed 100 feet high onto the walls of the Houses of Parliament.

"The reaction to all that was unbelievable," she says, with the cheekiest of smiles. "At the time, my body was getting more newspaper coverage than foreign wars and government scandals. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that people saw me as this sweet, innocent girl who did kids' TV shows. They found it hard to accept that I was a woman with a body. I couldn't believe everyone took it so seriously. Basically, I was just having a laugh."

Gail maintains that she didn't do any of this to further her career. "It was just something that happened," she says. "There was no masterplan. I was asked to pose and I was flattered. It did me no harm.

And it seems that Gail has been having just as much fun with her love life. Despite claiming that she is really nervous of people ("I'm hopeless at chatting up men. If I see someone I like I tend not to do anything about it, then regret it later"), she was linked with a string of men last year. After an on-off relationship with Prodigy star Keith Flint, she took up with Toploader guitarist Dan Hipgrave, and was coy earlier this year when spotted with a diamond ring on her engagement finger.

With such a hectic work schedule, it's little wonder Gail finds it difficult to maintain a relationship. VH1's Gail's Big Nineties, Top Of The Pops, Movie Chartshow and Wish You Were Here? are just a few of the programmes recently added to her ever-expanding CV.

"The last couple of years. have been unbelievable," she says. "I've been working non-stop and loving every minute of it. I've always known that I was going to do this kind of work. As a kid I was always a bit of a show off. What I do now is showing off in a more public way. Because all I have to do is be myself. I still can't believe that I get paid to have so much fun. And there's nothing I like more than fun!"

Unsurprisingly, Gail is a huge comedy fan with a long list of all-time-favourites. "Kenny Everett never failed to make me laugh. Same with Monty Python. These days, it's people like Eddie Izzard and Steve Coogan. I love The League Of Gentlemen and Father Ted." It doesn't look as if life will slow down much for Gail over the coming months. She's co-writing a sitcom. She's toying with the idea of writing a novel. She'd like to star in a movie..." There's a hundred and one things I want to do. It's an amazing life and I'm loving every second of it."