GQ - Gail Porter

Going back a few years, Blue Peter ran a priceless historical item about Victorian underwear that featured the strapping Sarah Greene striding about the studio in nowt but a bustier and stockings. Kids all over the land were agog as she repeatedly pointed out the fancy lace embroidery straining against her heaving bosom. It was risque stuff for the time, no doubt about it. Forget Zammo from Grange Hill with his taste for the brown, Greene's bustier won hands down.

Nobody seemed to notice, however, except us goggle-eyed juveniles. There was no outrage, no splash in the tabloids, no complaints to Points Of View (with Barry Took), nothing. If the undies episode was Greene's bid, after two years at Blue Peter, to graduate to more grown-up stuff, it was subtly executed. While it prompted TV execs to promote her to Going Live and, later, a daytime magazine show on Sky One, Greene's rep was never tarnished by notoriety.

Fifteen years on, there's a new breed of female children's presenter, for whom donning antiquated underwear at tea-time would be small potatoes indeed. Since the days of Valerie Singleton, the ladies of children's TV have evolved: from mumsy matrons such as Lesley Judd; to more fanciable schoolmistresses (the Greene years); to the current crop of pin-up - trendy, older sister-types who are often blonde and seem to know the score. Such as Zoe Ball on Live And Kicking. The ratings speak for themselves - not only are these crush-magnets a hit with the kids, but they're also more than a little popular with their dads and older brothers. As an executive might say - sex appeal broadens the demographic. Bring on the bubbly babes.

The leader of the new-school is, without a doubt, 27-year-old Gail Porter, who presents a wacky Sunday morning BBC2 magazine show called Fully Booked. Like the Sport, Gail gets you up in the morning. She's petite and blonde with big sunny eyes and her cheerful Edinburgh accent sounds like bird-song through the duvet. She makes funny faces and does a very popular impression of an angry beaver. But there's a drop of the hard stuff in all that Sunny Delight. Lord only knows what Biddy Baxter, bless her, would have made of Ms Porter's nipple ring, for example. Or her penchant for clubbing, although you won't find many men who'd disapprove. Mind how you go with her, though, Gail also does martial arts.

"Black belt in karate, oh yes," she says, sinking another glass of the house white and chopping the air with her free arm. The waitresses of this candlelit Soho eating house look on, worried. "I'd have to warn you three times before combat. Does that count as a warning, you warn them that you've got to warn them? Who knows, eh? It's not easy being fucking hard as nails." She cuts an attractive, comic figure in the stiff company of middle-aged diners. Boisterous, funny, fresh-faced and mischievously small, she could pass for a teenager if she tried. But beneath the happy-go-lucky, joshing exterior, Gail's a shrewd talent. And her move into TV wasn't a soft landing from some plummy drama school.

"I've done no end of shit jobs - you name it. I worked in bloody B&Q with a little red dress that said: 'Gail. Happy To Help'. Was I bollocks." She puts on a nasal, John Major voice: "'Excuse me, I'm redecorating my bathroom...' God. I used to make my mum come up to the hardware department to talk to me for hours. Actually, when I was at school I worked in the Chelsea Girl in Edinburgh at the same time as Shirley Manson was working at the Miss Selfridge. It's all happening in Edinburgh, I tell you."

After the shit jobs, Gail moved on to film school, hoping to be a director of some sort. After schlepping around, working as a runner - "the closest I've come to slavery" - and a few stints as a production assistant, she thought a little bigger and had a go in front of the camera. And within a few years, Gail had hop-skipped through a bunch of kid's programmes for BBC Scotland (Mega Mag, Up For It) before finally landing a job on Fully Booked. Suddenly everyone started taking notice.

The first time GQ met Gail there was uproar. You may remember the double-page spread in our December issue - the "Porterarse Blue" sessions as they're now known. It featured Gail, naked and brushed in baby oil, in a studio bathed in blue light. Arriving hot on the heels of Richard Bacon's cocaine scandal, the papers went bananas. Blue Peter presenter Bacon had been stitched up by the News Of The World and fired by the Beeb only a few weeks earlier, and the press drew a parallel between the two of them, running the pictures alongside shamefaced quotes by nervous BBC representatives. But taking a fantastic picture hardly compares with taking class A drugs. - And besides, Bacon was exposed against his will - Gail stripped of her own accord. In her defence, Gail claimed the pictures were for fun, not kids.

Despite all the finger-wagging from the Beeb, the GQ pictures have worked wonders. Since their publication, the letter box at Gail's Hampstead pad hasn't stopped flapping with job offers. That unspoken tenet of presenting children's programmes - that presenters must be squeaky-clean role models for kids - doesn't seem to have curbed the rise and rise of our Gail. She was recently invited over to LA by movie giants Miramax about a possible series of fun city guides for kids, and who knows how many other hush-hush possibilities are knocking about - Gail's not talking. Unsurprisingly, the silicone city jarred with Porter's upfront, down-to-earth manner. "I'll tell you what - they're fucking bonkers in LA, really plastic," she says, immediately ripping the piss out of the West Coast drawl. "Oh, you're Scaatch. Are you from Scaatchland? Are you from Edin-borrow?"

For some reason, Gail doesn't have a boyfriend and hasn't had one for - wait for it - two years. It's almost as though she's not really into men at all. She worships Eddie Izzard and she can reel off whole chunks of Alan Partridge, but that's because she likes a laugh. And there's nothing to the rumours that she was stepping out with her himbo co-host, Fully Booked's Tim Vincent -"load of rubbish, completely made-up bollocks," she laughs. Instead, her social life consists of visiting nightclubs, drinking wine - "not beer, makes me all gassy" - and then working it all off in the gym. "I think I'm a gymaholic, I must be. If it means waking up at six because I've got a meeting at nine then I'll do it for an hour and be high as a kite afterwards."

Well this can't last, it defies natural laws. There must surely be a limit to how long someone as industrious and talented as Miss Porter can bubble under the big time, and how one so luscious can possibly remain single. The last time Gail featured in GQ, she threatened to make the former happen. Mission accomplished. Perhaps this time she'll nab herself a fella as well. GQ