A new husband and a Space Hopper. Gail Porter already has the two loves of her life. The rest is child's play

This anecdote, told in Glasgow where Porter is finalising plans to stand in for Fred MacAulay on Radio Scotland while he is on holiday, neatly sums up the 30-year-old television presenter. It includes reference to her husband of two months - she rather sweetly mentions him in almost every answer, coos ''love you'' when he calls, and says she stayed in watching 11 videos over the weekend, keeping him company when he had flu - and it contains work, which she does plenty of. It also involves toys, something of a passion for the elfin, child-like bundle of energy sitting opposite me, drinking Diet Coke and then black coffee, but resisting a plate of sandwiches. ''I don't eat bread,'' says the already sylphlike Porter, dressed in head-to-toe black and a pair of trainers.

As a fully-fledged one-time ladette, like Denise Van Outen and Zoe Ball (Porter joined the women-behaving-badly club by doing a series of nude photoshoots for men's magazines, one of which projected an image of her bare body onto the Houses of Parliament, and by

dating The Prodigy's Keith Flint), this makes sense, or at least it did when she first revealed a passion for playthings in the 1990s. The ladette's mantra was always to play as hard as you worked, and to revel in traditionally male pleasures. A love of gadgets and retro ''boy's toys'' was always Porter's weakness in her singleton's flat in Soho. But she'll have left all that behind now, I suggest, as a grown-up married woman.

''A lot of my toys are stowed away these days,'' she says, ''but some I keep out all the time: the trampoline, Space Hopper, interactive Buzz Lightyear, interactive Yoda, the Star Wars light sabre and the remote control car. In the mornings, I bounce around on my Space Hopper watching Trisha. I get excitable about the daftest things, like going to see Shrek and then going to Sega World afterwards. Have you been?'' she asks, thrilling on about a virtual drum machine that lets you play Prince Charming by Adam and the Ants. Her heart-shaped face lights up as she reminds me how the drumming bit of the song went.

And what does Hipgrave - fittingly, at 25, he is her toyboy - make of all this? ''He doesn't mind,'' she says, ''he just reckons I'm Peter Pan; he's convinced I am.'' Just as I'm thinking what a weird thing that is to think about your wife, Porter adds that he has a photograph of her on top of the television in which she is pulling her ears out and making a face. ''I look like a small mouse; everyone says I look about five. I look like a small child but it doesn't bother me in the slightest.'' She uses this expression so often in the interview, protesting her lack of bother almost too much, you rather wonder if it might.

But isn't it time to grow up, I suggest, to move on? Zoe Ball quit radio to spend more time with her new family; Van Outen, minus the fiance with the kooky hats, is enjoying success and newfound critical respect in the musical Chicago. Porter, by contrast, is doing much the same as she was a few years ago, only without the saucy photoshoots: presenting an eclectic gaggle of television shows (Top of the Pops, Wish You Were Here, the martial arts programme Masters of Combat and Pulling Power, a motoring show broadcast only in the south of England) and then going home to play with her toys. She glosses over this, as she does almost everything.

''I've never really wanted to grow up,'' she says, matter-of-factly. ''I take on board all my responsibilities; I know about saving money and buying a house. I occasionally get freaked out by the grown-up stuff.'' She breaks off to tell me that when she and Hipgrave applied for a mortgage recently she kept saying ''don't want'' in her sleep. ''But then I know I can afford to do all that and still be a child. Great. I'm having a ball: me, my toys and Dan. Next I want to buy a puppy dog.''

The couple are waiting to hear if they have got the home they want, a London townhouse over several floors, with one room already earmarked as a ''toy room''. They live a quiet life, she says (''we never go out''), as ''best friends'' besides being husband and wife. Their only lack of compatibility is apparently in their sleeping habits. ''I'm really hyperactive and can't sleep for more than four hours at a stretch, whereas he likes to sleep for 12. I get up at 6am and head straight for the gym - he gets up late, but says that's just what guitarists do.''

Porter has always been adamant that, just as she would never marry, she would never have children. When I ask her if this too has changed, it's the only time she slightly loses her composure - she is, as you might expect, a supremely confident presenter of herself as much as any programme - and quickly turns the question back on me, asking if I have children. Eventually she does answer, almost.

''I did always say I'd never marry but then I didn't know I'd meet Dan. When he brought it up, it just didn't seem strange as I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. And we thought, imagine the party we could have. But a baby? I'd rather have a dog first. I can't see it happening in the near future. Dan says it would be like looking after two babies,'' she adds in one of several I'm-mad-me asides.

Known for being a babe (''the babe of the moment'', Chris Evans once said of her; ''hottest tot on the box'', was how Loaded described her) rather than being babyish, there is more to Porter than a girly girl simpering about puppy dogs. Having decided aged six that she wanted to be famous after seeing Star Wars (''that's when I got blurred between reality and make-believe; I was so affected by it''), her Portobello childhood featured lots of play-acting, singing into hairbrushes and hoping for fame to follow.

Having got a place at film school, she then left the course early to work as a runner for various production companies, doing thankless tasks, making coffee for everyone and once having to clean railings with a toothbrush. Persuading a cameraman to film her, Porter made her own showreel of interviews she'd done on the Royal Mile to send off to television companies. It worked. A job on Scottish Television followed, as did stints on children's television, but it was really a photoshoot in GQ that catapulted her to notoriety and the fame she had long sought. Having resigned from children's television four months before the shoot, many took her

decision to strip off as a ploy to change her image into something much more grown up. This worked, too, so well that she now says she is frustrated not to be able to leave the results of those photo sessions behind her.

Such are the dangers of working in a sexist industry I say, meaning that playing up to stereotypes such as women being sex objects or childlike creatures is to play with fire. But Porter says that sexism ''doesn't bother me personally in the slightest'', though she thinks it a ''horrible way to look at women - they get all sorts of labels attached to them''. It doesn't seem to occur to her that she might be one of those women.

What Gail Porter needs, and she's smart enough to know this, is a new success in her career, a major television job or a new direction altogether. There are regular rumours about jobs she has auditioned for and not got (nearly all of these flatly denied by her - ''they said I was up for Chicago the other day and I can't even sing!'') and mention of material she is writing. Details remain hazy, even when I ask her about it.

''It's hard to fit it all in because I'm so busy. We've got a few more meetings to have at my production company, Heroine, and a few ideas.'' And then she says something that makes it sound as if the ideas haven't gone down too well. ''Television's so hard at the moment because everyone's into voyeuristic TV - Big Brother, and documentaries about soap stars, pop stars and models. I prefer things like Seinfeld, Frasier and Louis Theroux.''

Porter is more enthusiastic in talking about a children's book she has surprised herself by starting to write, and next year's London marathon which she is training for. She already visits the gym early each morning (she was there at 6am before flying up to Glasgow), but says she's ''exhausted'' with the extra training. ''But I love working, really, like setting myself goals. I was getting a bit bored at the gym so I announced I'd do the marathon. If I'm not working all the time, I get a bit itchy,'' she explains.

Which is how she ended up, one presumes, with no time to reflect on the fact she'd just got married, but had no honeymoon. The wedding itself sounds to have been a genuinely informal celebration, with a friend taking the

photographs - ''we didn't want an official one and we certainly weren't interested in selling it to a magazine'' - a dinner at The Witchery for 68 close family and friends and then a massive party at Malmaison in Leith for 350 guests. ''We had this great marquee,'' she says, ''but I only got to go in there once for a quick dance. The rest of the time I was talking to people.'' So busy was she before the ceremony that she had no time to choose her own wedding dress. Instead, a

personal shopper at Harvey Nichols selected a silver Ronit Zilkha dress, and got some silver shoes handmade for her.

On the surface, life is great just now for the newlywed, and things that could bother her - the plateau her career has reached, the fact that she remains best known for some racy photographs - don't seem to. She is sunny, confident, clearly besotted with Hipgrave, gleefully showing me the photographs of him that she carries with her. She looks a little tired - though a touch of make-up for the photoshoot (she arrives wearing only mascara) deals with that - but doesn't act it, fizzing with enthusiasm for a new bag she's bought, for (pounds) 20, from American Retro in Soho. ''I was walking along Bond Street, going into Prada and all these places, looking for a bag, but then I thought, sod it, I'm going back to get that bargain.''

What dents the image of unalloyed serenity and contentment she is keen to present is something Porter tells me about her journey to Glasgow. It's her first flight since the attack on the World Trade Centre a fortnight earlier, an event she hasn't been able to stop reading about, she says - she arrives for the interview clutching a copy of Time magazine, with Osama bin Laden on the cover.

''I didn't like getting on the plane at all today,'' she begins, unprompted. ''I actually burst into tears when I got on. I was thinking of all the poor people who got on to planes, going to see their loved ones. I was thinking what if it was me - how would you react? How are all the people who have been left coping? I get very emotional about things.''

This anecdote is in direct contradiction of the steely, assured surface Porter presents to the world, the persona that says things like ''I can take personal attacks - it doesn't matter'', seemingly unruffled by anything. There are other things that suggest a tinge of insecurity, not least the seven gym visits a week by a tiny, fit sliver of a woman and all the protestations of just how much she doesn't suffer from any vulnerability. This isn't entirely the case: her ''people'' have asked to approve this article before publication; when this request is refused, they insist a PR person sit in on the interview.

And then there's all that wearying glee about the toys, and her Petra Pan syndrome. In one of those celebrity Q&A articles recently she listed her greatest fear as growing up and I wonder, what's so scary about that? I think it might be that Gail Porter has grown up and has realised that she's in fact not invincible, like her heroine, Princess Leia in Star Wars. I think it might also be as simple as the fact that she doesn't know what to do next, to keep her in the limelight she has long craved. ''I get a bit freaked out,'' she admits, her cherubic face darkening suddenly, ''about what to do next, where to go. Sometimes, it's really hard to know.''

Porter brightens almost instantly, though, back in control, showing me photographs of her brother (also blessed with good genes, he is 27 but could pass for a schoolboy) and her mother, both of whom she is very close to. Since her

parents divorced when Porter was in her mid-twenties, she has bonded with her mother in ways she never had before, she says. ''I took her on holiday to Spain to cheer her up, and she pulled! I spent the week on my own, calling out to her at midnight, 'what time do you call this?' It was like Saffy and Edina on Ab Fab.''

There's another photograph in her wallet, one of Porter as a toddler. A dog-eared strip of black-and-white images from a photo-booth, it is held together with sticky tape. Behind her, there's an image of a jumbo jet from a selection of scenic backgrounds you could choose from. ''My mother was obviously trying to make out we were part of an international jet set,'' laughs Porter. The child, pretty in a floral dress, looks straight to camera, with a winning smile, like she's born to do it. She probably went home straight after, delving into her toy box for something to amuse her after a session in front of the camera. Some things don't change for Gail Porter, though these days she reaches for playthings, she says, as ''a bit of escapism''. You can't help wondering from what. n

Gail Porter will stand in for Fred MacAulay for a week on his morning radio show, beginning on Monday, October 15, on BBC Radio Scotland.