Do it yourself

Carol Smillie gets paid handsomely to be a show-off.

Smillie knew she was more like her extrovert father than her painfully shy mother. "I’d think, that will be me when I’m older, saying, ‘I was really attractive once.’ Nobody will be impressed. It’ll be, ‘Oh, shut up, Grandma, and go away. You’re old.’" At the age of five Smillie wanted to be a tightrope walker. It wasn’t the thrill of danger that appealed to her, because she didn’t actually realise there would be any. She just wanted to wear sparkly frocks and have an audience. And then her mother pointed out that she would have to leave home and she might kill herself. Duff job description, Smillie thought. "I just wanted to be up there with everyone looking at me." Just like her dad. "He was the showman in our family. I think that’s where that side in me comes from, the desire to be in the public eye."

She became a television presenter instead of a tightrope walker. Bruised ego rather than broken bones when you fall. She recently performed a tricky high-wire manoeuvre by leaving the BBC’s Changing Rooms, the show that really made her name, and moving to the lower ratings of Dream Holiday Home on Five. "It’s very difficult to move on," she admits. "Changing Rooms was just so innovative in its time. It started a huge wave of TV shows - who would have thought DIY would be so big? I don’t want to move on to a copycat show. I want something big to happen again, but I don’t know if it will. For most people, it never happens."

It’s disarming to hear Carol Smillie dismiss herself as a show-off. The taxi-driver who zoomed me from the delayed train to meet her reckoned she would be a nippy sweetie. Reminded him of a friend of his wife’s. A handful. Probably right. Why rush? Queen Bees are always late. Indeed she was, but not late, late. Just celebrity late. Par for the course. She arrived looking svelte and sounding a little clipped, and I stifled a yawn. But then it became obvious that she wasn’t clipped, just harassed. She had been trying to contact me on the wrong number to let me know she was a bit behind. And that’s not par for the course at all, a celebrity who notices they are keeping someone waiting. And the reason she was late (has she read the Celebrity Rule Book at all? She is willing to offer an explanation?) is that her nanny had an emergency today and Smillie had to rush across town to her sister’s with the children and then rush back.

Smillie has always managed to juggle children and career and has just collaborated with writer Eileen Fursland to produce Carol Smillie’s Working Mum’s Handbook. She has three children, two girls and a boy, and yes, she suffered the usual trauma of returning to the workplace. "You torture yourself. You put yourself through this terrible guilt and get yourself in such a state, and it’s just daft, really. We lug guilt around from place to place while men just go, ‘What’s your problem? What’s wrong with you?’"

She couldn’t have given up her job completely, though. "I think I knew in my heart of hearts that doing that would be worse. Much as I love my children and love being a mother, I think I might have turned into a different sort of person, the sort of torn-faced, impatient, mummy’s-always-yelling type of mother that you don’t want to be."

Her own mother never worked when Smillie and her brother and two sisters were young, but she later took a job to put Carol through private school. "She loved it and I saw a different side to her. She worked in a store. She suddenly had a social life she hadn’t had before and that was nice. I know she loved it. She obviously didn’t mind the way things were before, but she found a new lease of life and had more to talk to us about than the washing."

Yet she never lost her shyness. When Carol became famous and the Beechgrove Garden team came to do her parents’ garden, her mother refused to make an appearance. "It ended up just me and my dad. She was behind the wee twitchy curtains like some

mad aunt."

Her mother was disappointed when private school didn’t lead her daughter to a traditional profession. She went to art school instead, a decision that found more favour with her engineer father than her mother. But she didn’t last. "I realised I was on a hiding to nothing," she says. "All rich artists are dead, aren’t they? Show me a wealthy artist who hasn’t had a pig awful life to get there."

She had taken up modelling part-time and it felt like money for old rope compared to throwing pots of paint at walls and sweating over how it dripped down. Her parents were horrified, but her tutor was pragmatic. "He actually said to me, ‘I think you should chuck this and do the modelling,’ which I think was an indirect way of saying, ‘You are really rotten at this, just go.’ He said, ‘I think you’ll make a lot more money as a model than as an artist,’ and he was absolutely right."

She never considered London and, at five foot six, was too short for the catwalk, anyway. But modelling in Scotland is character-forming. You don’t do Armani shows every week, because there aren’t any. You do 10p off crisps in Safeway instead. Probably dressed as a potato. (Smillie’s extensive repertoire included Holly Wholemeal, to advertise bread.) For a while she became an underwear model for Lejaby, but her big break came when she landed the job as hostess in the TV gameshow Wheel of Fortune. At last! Sparkly frocks!

But the problem with being paid to pout prettily and look dim is that people assume you are dim. "I don’t think I was terribly bright in most people’s eyes," says Smillie, who was bright enough not to care what other people thought except when it got in her way. She contacted every video company in Scotland, offering to work for free. "I knew I was going to have to eat humble pie and say, ‘Okay, whatever it takes to get something else.’

"I worked for nothing, which is quite a powerful word. I wanted it for the footage to make up a good tape that looked like I had done everything." She took the resulting tape to an audition for The Travel Show, sweating at the thought of being exposed as a fraud. "I was thinking, ‘They’re going to know this isn’t proper telly.’ They asked me to talk them through it, and I said, ‘Oh, it’s just local stuff - you’d never have seen it.’ And I came away thinking it was a total waste of time." She got the job.

Jobs on The Travel Show and Holiday followed, and Smillie’s career took off. Hearts of Gold. Smillie’s People. Changing Rooms. The National Lottery. For a while it looked like Smillie and her English counterpart Carol Vorderman had carved up telly between them. But it hadn’t landed in Smillie’s lap. There are two images of her. One is pretty Miss Girl-Next-Door. Smiley Smillie. The other is... "Hard-nosed bitch," she interrupts with a laugh. Or nippy sweetie, as the taxi-driver put it. Was it true she admired a celebrity guest’s outfit to her face on the Lottery show, then insisted it be changed because it was the same colour as her own? Smillie looks horrified. No, it’s not. Who said that? If it happened, it wasn’t her who asked. "I would never…" she says, trailing away.

Part of the problem for Smillie is that you are not allowed to be the girl next door and ambitious. It’s against trade descriptions. It’s getting ideas above your station. But Smillie is unapologetic about her determination, her networking and lobbying and working for free to achieve a better future. "One thing I learned from my mum and dad is that you don’t get anything in life without working hard for it. Nobody is going to knock on the door and go, ‘Here’s a fantastic opportunity for you.’ And I just always knew that."

She was ambitious for lifestyle rather than fame. "I knew I wanted to have my own flat and I knew I didn’t want to wait till I got married before I had the life I wanted. Another thing I learned from my parents was don’t wait for a man to provide it for you. Just do it for yourself."

"Do it for yourself" sounds as good a summary as any for feminism, but interestingly Smillie shies away from the word. Oh no, she says. "A feminist is a scary person who bangs on a lot about women’s rights. I might be more of a feminist if I was married to someone from Wifeswap."

In fact, she’s married to restaurateur Alex Knight. "He lets me get away with quite a lot but not too much, because I could be quite overpowering if I was allowed to be, and I don’t want to be. And he’s quite good at saying, ‘Oh, shut up. You’re not that great.’" Sounds like the role her mother played for her father. "And he’s not one of the boys, going out drinking every Friday night. I couldn’t bear that either." Oh, she adds, and he’s devastatingly attractive. She likes the balance he provides. "I was in a couple of relationships before I was married, one where I was overpowered and one in which I had too much power." The latter boyfriend was lovely but "too soft. I wanted him to stand up and say, ‘No, I don’t want to do that, I want to do this.’ It’s annoying after a while. In both I knew the balance wasn’t right."

The man she felt overpowered by was Glasgow club owner Paul Joseph, 10 years her senior. You can see Smillie cringe when she’s asked about him. Sometimes, things look all wrong in print. She was only 19 when she was with him, but the reason it’s still interesting is that it was hinted that Smillie was a gold-digger. And although I don’t say that, I think she guesses at the interest because she says suddenly, "He was very wealthy and older and I think people thought I was a daft wee girl just clinging in there for the money, but I really did love him. And I suppose he did show me things that I would never have experienced at my age. We went out to dinner in lovely restaurants, all that kind of thing. But it wasn’t right in the end. For me it wasn’t, nor for him, I’m sure." Did his wealth turn her head? "I think I thought I could do this for myself if I worked hard enough. I was never comfortable just living off him."

Listening to Smillie talk, you can see why things sometimes go wrong for her in print. In person, she is very likeable; lively and good fun. She laughs a lot, her voice bubbling constantly like a pot on the stove. But if you strip away the fun and the irony and the humour (and particularly the self-deprecation that shows the person she makes most fun of is herself), and you leave her words in cold black and white, they can be seem more acerbic than they really are. It happened recently in an interview. She joked about Changing Rooms and the havoc the designers caused and the result was headlines everywhere about sour grapes and Smillie supposedly savaging her former colleagues.

Her relationship with the press is sometimes strained. She won a press complaints commission case after a tabloid photographed her on the day of her mother’s funeral three years ago. Smillie’s husband had spotted the photographer lurking in the garden across the road. "Alex took his camera off him and said, ‘Please don’t do this.’ And the photographer replied, ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’ I didn’t want to be remembered for the day I killed a photographer, so I gave it back, but I so wanted to wrap it round his neck. At the time, my husband restrained me from going into the editor’s office and decking him." She says she will never work for that particular newspaper group again, a threat

that may be as empty as a Clare Short resignation speech. But I wouldn’t bet on it if I was the managing director.

Worst for Smillie was the fact that a photograph of her mum, a woman who hated intrusion and had hidden from even family cameras all her life, was used in the paper, too. She still doesn’t know how they got that picture. Even the family had precious few photographs. "I just felt it was a terrible shame that I had brought on my family because of my job," says Smillie.

Losing her mother was the worst experience of her life. She had reached the age of 38 without knowing anyone who had died before. "She had been ill for a year, but she was so private she would never have admitted it to us in a million years. She was just much more introverted and she wasn’t eating well. I think she knew she was going to die. She kind of cleared out all her drawers and she cleaned out her bag and her purse and put it all in order. She had seen all her grandchildren being born and I think maybe she thought, ‘That’s great, I’ve had enough now. I’d like to go.’"

She wasn’t a sentimental woman. Not one for a fuss. The manner of her going reflected that. So did her family’s chosen tribute. Her mother had a favourite tearoom, but there was nowhere to sit while waiting in the queue so the family bought a commemorative bench. "We should have written on the back, ‘Thank God for somewhere to sit at last’," laughs Smillie. "My dad put a message on it and we all had a good laugh to ourselves. She’ll be saying, ‘A bit bloody late now, isn’t it? And this tea’s rotten!’"

Smillie finds the interest in her can be unnerving. She came home once to find a journalist waiting for her. "This sleazy, spivvy guy gets out," she says. Surely not a journalist, Carol. "And he says, ‘Excuse me, Ms Smillie, I just want to ask you…’ I knew it was something horrible and put my foot down and suddenly he started running and this lens came out and I thought what…? I belted in the door and phoned my manager." Who was it? She didn’t know. Well, what did they want? Em, she didn’t know that either. Useless. Two hours later her manager phoned back. The press thought she and Alex were splitting up.

Smillie was mystified. "At first you go, ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ and then

you think, ‘Actually, that’s not funny. It’s horrible.’" Then she remembered the flat they had just bought for renting out and how she had visited every day for the last couple of weeks, organising furniture. "Like I was going to move out of my house to live…" she says indignantly. "Excuse me." Her seven-year-old daughter, Christie, heard her parents discussing the story. "Are you and Daddy splitting up?" she asked. "I said, ‘No. It’s rubbish, Christie. Just ignore it.’"

Post-Changing Rooms, she has turned down offers in order to wait for the right one. She admits she sometimes hears a little voice whispering "what if it doesn’t…" But the fear doesn’t grip her the way it once might have. "I’ve got other things in my life now. I’ve never relied on TV solely. I’ve got a few shrewd business investments. I won’t like it if it ends, but it would be really devastating if you had nothing else."

Recently, she was asked to take part in a new series of I’m a Celebrity - Get Me Out of Here. And will she? "No!" she exclaims, horrified. "People get criticised for doing it to boost flagging careers and I’d hate to read that. It all gets a bit nasty and hurtful. I don’t want to be open to that much criticism." How much does she want fame now? "Not with a hunger. Not like that."

In days gone by, the public watched celebrities on the fame tightrope and oohed and aahed at the glamour of Up There. Now we’re too busy shoogling the support stands. Only a tumble from a great height makes us ooh and aah now. Smillie knows it. But earlier in the conversation, through all the jokes about her and her show-off dad, she also said that her father was actually a fantastic diver. He had been chosen for the Olympic team and never got to go because the war came along.

Sad, really, she said, recognising the poignancy of missed opportunity. And I think that in the unlikely event of the current tremor of uncertainty precipitating a Smillie fall, she’d pick herself up, dust down her sparkly frock and delight in telling her grandchildren how she seized every opportunity in her days as a professional show-off.

Carol Smillie’s Working Mum’s Handbook (Virgin Books, 11.99), co-written with Eileen Fursland, is out on Thursday.