The Sunday Times - Pret A Porter

To her critics TV presenter Gail Porter is the embodiment of grasping, naked ambition, but Lynn Cochrane finds the newly-married star is full of child-like charm at 30.

I wait for Gail Porter in a bedroom of the Malmaison, Glasgow. It is a haven of libidinous luxury. A decent bottle of red wine sits unopened on the dresser, the sheets are crisped to perfection. Most men finding themselves in my position would be honing their seduction techniques.

Porter is, after all, a blonde famous for taking her clothes off. The television presenter, who grew up in Edinburgh's Portobello, appeared naked in GQ magazine, bathed in blue light, covered in baby oil and talking about her pierced nipple. In FHM magazine, another men's glossy, she sported a white bikini under the headline "Gail Porter and the sexiest babes on British TV". In a now infamous stunt, her naked image was projected onto the Houses of Commons.

I, unlike your average male however, expect to be immune to the obvious charms of the ever-smiling Porter, whose ambition, I suspect, is as naked as her much-photographed torso. The former children's television presenter, who now hosts an eclectic bunch of shows including Top of the Pops, Wish You Were Here and Masters of Combat, the martial arts programme, admits she has wanted to be famous since seeing Princess Leia in Star Wars. In the past at least, she has been more than willing to flaunt her assets to grab her precious 15 minutes.

Porter arrives via another room where she has been staying for a week while standing in for Fred MacAulay on Radio Scotland. Clutching a mobile phone, she trails her new husband, Dan Hipgrave, the Toploader guitarist.

"Oooooh, look at the room. It's great, nicer than ours. Isn't it Dan?" she beams. The pair married two months ago in an Edinburgh registry office and are obviously very much in love. She rather sweetly defers to him regularly. "Am I always happy honey?" she asks when I inquire about her chirpy demeanour. "Dan says pretty much so."

After a night out at The Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in Ashton Lane a few days earlier, where Hipgrave was introduced to stovies, she lovingly offered to make them for him when they got back to London. "And I can't even cook salad," she laughs.

Hipgrave is equally besotted. Before they married, he coyly asked if he might try on one of her rings, noted where it sat on his finger, and secretly arranged a 10-diamond band as a surprise wedding gift for his bride. "I was like, where did this come from?" Porter says, mimicking her wide-eyed astonishment.

Marriage, she adds, has cemented their relationship. "I'm much more contented. I love him even more."

The institution, one which she always insisted she would never enter, certainly seems to suit. Her creamy skin, devoid of make-up, is without blemish. Large blue eyes are framed by tousled blonde hair that she scrapes back into a severe ponytail. Her famously curvaceous body that so delighted legions of lads' magazine readers, is swaddled beneath a black, woolly polo neck and a pair of denims. Porter could pass for a 22-year-old student.

This year, however, she hit 30. "Thirty sounds older but, of course, it doesn't make a whit of difference," she insists, sipping a tomato juice.

"I'm not frightened of getting older. I'd be more frightened of being in my middle fifties and actually thinking I should be staying in watching telly and morning game shows that ask questions about antiques."

I have read a lot about Porter's Peter Pan refusal to grow up. The couple share their rented Soho apartment with a clutch of toys including a space hopper and trampoline. The latest addition is a cyberdog that can be taught tricks, another present from Hipgrave.

There's her ladette tendencies too - she hit the headlines in February after bragging about presenting the children's TV show Fully Booked while "absolutely pissed". Hipgrave is obviously referring to this incident when he complains Porter gets slammed for being honest. She had a drink or two the night before, but doesn't everyone?

Perhaps Porter is just hugely naive, not fully understanding that to the youngsters who watch her TV shows, she is a role model. Or maybe she genuinely doesn't give a hoot about what others think. Criticism of her in the press has certainly not dulled her extraordinary willingness to be cross-examined. During our one-and-a-half hour interview there is no sign that this gamine creature with the corn-coloured hair and the trendy trainers is having a less than fascinating time.

She has her biographical details neatly tied up like gift boxes. What school she went to, what she studied at college, her first job and so on.

Then on to Porter's family. Yes, she is close to her mother. In fact, her mother happened to be there on the first night she met Hipgrave at Chris Evans's TFI Friday show on Channel 4. They all went out together for a drink, just as friends because Hipgrave had a girlfriend. "But mum used to keep a photograph of him on the fridge. She'd say:

'Why are you not going out with someone as lovely as Dan?'. "

While the make-up artist dusts her cheeks with blusher, Porter asks her numerous questions about her children and home life. Later she signs a birthday card for the photographer's flatmate after quizzing him about his camera equipment. I know such charm should invite scepticism, but I find it working on me. I had expected a celebrity with the hard-edged ambition of Anne Robinson and the body of Pamela Anderson. But Porter's open friendliness seems without guile.

In December, Porter will be presenting the Clothes Show at the Birmingham NEC. In between times, along with her TV commitments, she and Hipgrave - her toyboy at 26 - will be embracing adulthood with their first mortgage. The gadgets will be packed in boxes and shipped out to a two-bedroom home in Hampstead. Hipgrave's only requirement was that it had patio doors leading out onto a garden.

"Houses cost a fortune in London. We'd been looking and just thought at one point it wasn't going to happen," says Porter. "This one we bought a week after we got married but it's taken until now to exchange. We just found out yesterday everything was okay. It's a little house, really cute. It's great, I can go running on Hampstead Heath."

Her husband, a former psychiatric nurse, might be wearing an Adidas sports top but he will not be joining her - their compatibility seems to stop at fitness regimes. Porter is up most mornings at 5am. After catching the latest headlines on BBC's News 24 channel, she nips out to the gym for a workout and is back home reading the newspapers long before Hipgrave surfaces.

"By the time it gets to about 11 o'clock I get very grumpy. Every 20 minutes it's like 'Come on Dan, get up, let's go out and play', " says Porter.

I'm not convinced that the ladette mantra of 'work hard, play hard', from the days when she partied with the likes of the Prodigy's Keith Flint, still applies to the petite Scot. She's been shopping in Glasgow. What did she buy? "A suede bag from Gap and Pamela Stephenson's book about Billy Connolly. It's been a cheap week."

Her only plan for the weekend when she returns to London is to catch the Coen brothers' latest film, The Man Who Wasn't There. Oh, and she might continue her quest to persuade Hipgrave they should buy a dog. "Not a yappy one, I'd like a bulldog or maybe a dalmatian. I love dalmatians."

It does not sound very rock'n'roll. "We don't really go out that much," she confesses. Doubtless though, the same drive that has her springing out of bed when most pop stars are just climbing into theirs also dictates her work ethic. Television commitments continue to dominate her schedule. After her wedding, a low-key affair for friends and family at The Witchery restaurant, followed by a party at the Malmaison in Edinburgh, it was straight to London on a 6am flight.

"We had to postpone the honeymoon for a week because I had to get back," says Porter. "But it worked out much better because previously we only had four days and this meant we could take a week in Crete. Plus the other nice thing was people coming up to you in the street saying congratulations."

Porter also has her own production company called Heroine although "it's on hold at the moment until after Christmas". She has "three or four ideas" but does not say what they are except that she would love to do documentaries. Her bent would be more Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends than Panorama.

I voice the thought that it might be hard for her to be taken seriously as a documentary film-maker. "People might think 'she's blonde, she presents Top of the Pops, she can't have any brains', but I hope they don't," she says, without a hint of embarrassment.

Porter admits to being hugely ambitious. Her mother took her to see Star Wars when she was a child. "I cried at the end, I couldn't understand why I couldn't go with Princess Leia." She quickly worked out the way to disappear into the screen was to get a job on television.

It was a happy childhood. Porter has one brother. Her parents divorced when she was an adult. Her mum, she says, was "pretty laid back" although "she had her rules and regulations". At Portobello high school she was a model pupil by the sound of it, who "worked hard and did my homework". In the school's production of Grease she played Sandy "of course". She still has the video of her performance.

"Were you in any school musicals?" she asks Hipgrave. He shakes his head. "Bet you were too cool," she coos.

Wild behaviour was notable by its absence during her adolescence. At 18, however, she began an advertising course at a college in Watford, north of London, before changing over to study film and television. "I did a lot of skiving," she admits. "There was me, a little Edinburgh girl at 18, heading to London. I thought Watford must be cool because it was 20 miles outside. What was I thinking of? The local disco was called Paradise Lost, that just about sums it up."

Back in Edinburgh she became a runner for a TV production company. She loved it. "I did everything: got people cigarettes, scrubbed railings, drove around the country delivering equipment."

However, she had not abandoned her dream of stardom. Working behind the scenes, she reasoned, would only help her understand the business. Eventually, after five years, she decided to strike out for a job in front of the camera. She sent numerous letters asking for jobs but got nowhere until she came up with the idea of compiling her own audition tape.

Shrewdly she got her mother to video her "going mad running round the garden". More shrewdly still she was dressed in a bikini and wellingtons. Not surprisingly, a rash of TV companies invited her for interviews. One of them was Scottish Television where she went on to present the Totally Interactive Game Show. At the audition the script failed to appear. Her ability to ad lib and think on her feet - it was to be a live show - landed her the job. A stint with Fully Booked for the BBC followed.

She has since made the often difficult transition to mainstream TV, no doubt helped on by her many risqué photo shoots. Although she waxes lyrical about loving Top of the Pops - "it's an institution and great fun" - there is a feeling when talking to Porter that she is at a crossroads in her life. Various paths lie ahead. It is wondering which one to take that could incite panic. She wants to get into films although she admits she's not sure how to go about it. She has already made a cameo appearance as herself in a film called Tabloid starring John Hurt and Matthew Rhys.

She is also writing a children's book. "Well, I'm trying to. Dan gets really involved, asking me what is coming next in the story. I don't usually know."

She might have presented kids' TV shows, but having a child has never been on the agenda. However, even that might be changing. There is no plan to add to the family but, if they did, Porter jokes they would call a girl Honey and a boy Hopper.

So what signs, then, that she is growing up at last? Porter is charismatic but hard to fathom. She does not seem to have a clue where she gets her drive and girlish enthusiasm, although a throw away story about working in the Russell & Bromley shoe shop in Edinburgh, where the manager told her she would never amount to anything, proves revealing.

"As soon as I could afford it, I bought a Russell & Bromley storecard. I don't think I've ever used it," she laughs.

There is also just the teeniest suggestion that life is not always rosy for Porter. She has her down days. Hipgrave mentions how, as a nurse, he used music as a form of therapy. He still does, it seems. When Porter gets "anxious or stressed" he plays her favourite Disney tunes.

Porter may be on the brink of finally being taken seriously as an adult, but there is little sign of her losing touch with the child within.