Loaded - Oh if I must!

Cheeky TV minx Gail Porter reckoned she'd never pose naked again, until loaded came along and suddenly all her clothes fell off!

She enters the Soho bar, not walking as such, more like bouncing. Sprightly, like a Walt Disney cricket, she suggests constant, indefatigable motion. It's been a typically busy day for the elfin lass with the UK's most famous arse. Kicking off at the sparrow's first chirp with The Big Breakfast. Followed by a turn on the Movie Chart Show, an hour's interlude spent huffing and puffing down the gym, then full steam ahead with two shows for Virgin Radio, a couple of TV ads and Top of The Pops. After this chat with Loaded she's off to a birthday party. Her own, as it happens.

She's just turned 29 but, not a little disconcertingly, she looks about 15 and a half. Almost legal, but not quite. Just last night She was turned away from an off-licence. '"If you're old enough to buy alcohol', she was firmly told, "then my name is Fu Manchu!"

She looks impossibly, perilously young. Like butter wouldn't melt if you blowtorched it. Only these days, we're all too aware that butter melts all to easily in Gail's cakehole. It used to be that she was the fresh-faced girl beaming guilelessly on charmingly inane kids' TV shows. Then, with the sudden twang of a bra-strap being hastily unhooked, she did a Kylie and discovered sex. Big time. A run of naughty photoshoots. A nipple picrcing. Her bare arse blown up to King Kong proportions and flashed onto the outer walls of the House Of Commons. Then to top it all off she started running with The Prodigy's Keith Flint, a move which recalled Kylie stepping out with the late Michael Hutchence.

In the space of a few months, she was a girl transformed. From the goody - goody girl-next-door who might have been expected to spend her spare time knitting chunky jumpers and baking buns for the church jumble sale, to an altogether different girl-next-door, the type who insists on leaving the curtains wide open as she towels herself down after a piping-hot bath - in the full knowledge that half the neighbourhood's male population is camped out in the garden below, getting a proper old eyeful.

At the time, it was widely assumed that Gail's discovery of sex, much like Kylie's, amounted to little more than an opportunistic career move. In Gail's case, a shameless, brazen way of declaring she was through with the world of kiddies' telly with its endless gunge tanks and conveyor belts of gormless boy bands, and was preparing to make a leap to the grown-up stuff.

"Actually," says Gail, "I'd already left kids' TV when I started taking my clothes off for the camera. I was already doing older stuff like the Movie Chart Show. When I went along to that first naked photo session, I had no intentions of getting my kit off. I'd never dreamt that anybody would want to take that sort of picture of me. When I arrived, there were all these very skimpy outfits waiting for me. I found that quite exciting. When it came to the suggestion that I should flash my bottom, I thought, 'Well, why not?' So I went for it. And I was very flattered by the results?'

Unlike, say, Anthea Turner and Emma Thompson, whose attempts to give virtue the slip and start sexing themselves gave off a strong whiff of menopausal desperation, Gail looked entirely comfortable with flashing her bits and bobs in the pages of men's magazines. Her buffo poses suggested a girl-turned-woman who wished to communicate a new-found capacity for horizontal pleasure. She looked as if she'd just munched on the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and wished to share the pips with every last man Jack. Crucially, she also looked as though she was having a good laugh.

"Well," she says, "that's true. What I wasn't prepared for was the national outcry that followed, because other TV presenters had taken their kit off for the camera and nobody blinked. Maybe it was something to do with the timing. Richard Bacon had just been done for disgracing Blue Peter about a week before my pictures came out, so the media saw it as a bit of a trend: TV presenters behaving badly, whatever. I think it also had something to do with the fact that I look about 16 in those first photos. And so people reacted like I was far too young to actually have a body. Of course, loads of people really liked those photos. Lots of people told me they were really sexy. Not that I set out to look sexy. Maybe there were some men who looked at those photos and thought, 'Hello, she's up for it.' But I didn't set out to give the impression that I was up for it. The women I spoke to just said, 'Nice shots.' Maybe a lot of men were thinking 'Nice arse,' But I'd sooner them think 'Nice arse' than 'Terrible arse'."

Whatever your opinion of her now famous hindquarters, there was no getting away from that most shapely part of her anatomy for most of last year. Gail's arse indeed became preposterously famous. After the initial shock, Gail herself seemed to revel in the attention and gleefully upped the ante in her winking flirtation with the wanking public. "My arse," she was quoted as saying, "is the smallest in England?' This conjured up the intriguing image of a team ofverifiers from the Guinness Book Of Records popping round her flat armed with sharpened pencils and measuring rods.

"Well," sighs Gail, "l never actually claimed to have the smallest arse in the country. What I said was that I had a very small bottom. Which is a fact. Small bottom, and breasts that are too big for my body. I'm not moaning, but I do think my body is a bit odd. Or maybe it's me that's a bit odd. I've always been a little. . . lop-sided. I remember being asked at school what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said I wanted to be in the Mafia. I've always lived in a bit of a dream world, ever since I decided I wanted to be famous." She's been that way almost as far back as she can remember. Watching Star Wars, falling in love with Princess Leia and deciding she'd rather fancy living in a completely make-believe world.

"That's how I imagined fame would be - like living in a lightbulb. And it is a bit like that. There are days when I'm walking about and I realise that I live in a massive fantasy bubble. My happy little bubble. Maybe I live too much in my own head. It's a bit like the Priory clinic inside my head?"

After taking a college course in media studies, she worked as a runner in a video company and a tape operator in an editing suite, then helped produce some TV commercials before writing to cable channel Live TV, cheekily suggesting she could help present their coverage of the Edinburgh Festival. She got the gig and sent the resulting tapes to every TV company she could think of. Commissions quickly followed, and she was none too fussy what she took on. One of her first TV appearances involved dressing up in a Habitat lampshade and pretending to be the sun. She then fell headlong into kids' TV, presenting Disney's Great Cartoon Chase and Scratchy & Co before landing the main job on Sunday morning's Fully Booked. And after that, VH1's Gail's Big Nineties, C5's Movie Chart Show, TOTP, Virgin Radio, newspaper columns and her latest Internet show, Dotcomedy. Busier than a one-eyed sausage dog in a sausage shop. All well and good, yet the nagging thought remains that Gail has yet to do anything that's eclipsed her headline-grabbing, bare-arsed antics. In other words, she's famous enough to be recognised by wolf-whistling scaffolders the length and breadth and to be able to auction her socks for charity, but still not half as famous as her arse.

"But that's OK," she says. "Because I am famous enough, and I've never been interested in fame for fame's sake. I genuinely love what I do, and I like to have a laugh doing it. Whether I'm down the pub or on the telly, I like to have a laugh with life. Me on the telly is just an extension of me down the pub. The only difference is that I'm not reading from an autocue down the pub. And my speech doesn't get slurred when I'm on the telly?"

If anything, she's set to get even busier. A role in a movie ("a comedy about people dying"). Writing comedy scripts. Kick-boxing. Partying like a mad 'un. Small wonder she has little time for what she quaintly calls "courting". "Am I attached right now ? Er, I'm not sure. . ." she says, glancing wistfully towards loaded Art Editor Jim. "Anyway, it's not like I ever get chatted up. It just doesn't happen. I can understand why women like Caprice or Helena Christensen wouldn't be approached by men, because they're stunning and men are probably intimidated by them. But I can't remember the last time someone tried to chat me up, and I'm not the least bit intimidating. I reckon men just don't notice me. Unless it's a version of me that's 100ft high and plastered on the front of the House Of Commons!"

All said, as though a pound of Anchor wouldn't melt, while the Soho bar fills up and passing men cast her no end of lustful glances. At least that's the sort of glances I think they are. Then again, they might just be wondering what this cute little squash blossom is doing sitting around a bar sipping chilled Chablis when she ought to be holed up in her bedroom studying for her home economics O-Level or some such headcheese. Twenty-nine going on 15 and a half. Like I say . . . very, very disconcerting. But lovely with it. Gail is appearing in Dotcomedy, Fridays at 11.05pm on Channel 4.