Why I want to be in Playboy

One minute Cat Deeley was playing Mary in the school nativity, the next, Satan's girlfriend on MTV. But the new queen of Saturday morning children's television still hasn't worked out which of the two roles suits her better. "That's the thing with me," she sighs over a scrambled-egg breakfast. "I'm a total mixture. I'm not a real bad girl, but I have my moments."
     We are in the sort of cafe where the waiters speak French, the scrambled eggs come with smoked salmon and you can choose from 30 different types of coffee. This is trendy Belsize Park in north-west London, where Cat Deeley has just bought her first home.
     Having rattled around the outer fringes of London - Docklands, Golders Green - when she first moved down from Sutton Coldfield a couple of years ago, Deeley is now curling up in something of a television ghetto. Down the road lives the former diva of children's television, Zoe Ball; round the corner is comedian Frank Skinner, a fellow Midlands exile and West Brom fan; and the local pub just happens to be the Haverstock Arms, the celebrity hangout whose landlord tends the bar on Chris Evans' TFI Friday. "I just love my new flat," she purrs. "I thought Id go mad living on my own, but when I sit on the terrace after a long day, the stress just melts away."
     The "living on my own" comes as a bit of a surprise, given her current babe status. She once famously turned down a date with the Aston Villa footballer Stan Collymore, and it was recently reported that she had split up with rap star Huey DiFontaine, of the Fun Lovin' Criminals. But she's adamant that just now she doesn't "want to say if I've got a boyfriend or not".
     The stress in her life is more understandable and comes from juggling slots on MTV, the 24-hour music channel, and getting up before dawn every Saturday to co-host two ITV shows, which go by the unwieldy tiles of SMTV Live and CDUK. She shares the shows with two cheeky young actors-turned-pop-stars-turned-TV-presenters, Ant and Dec. While the Geordie twosome run riot, flirting and teasing and bouncing off the walls, Deeley's job is to maintain some semblance of control.
     She seems ideally suited to the role. She is bubbly, bright and laughs a lot, the kind of girl you want to be friends with and looks like she'd happily be friends with you, too. this is not to mention the stunning looks which have launched a thousand websites - she appears on just about every generic TV Internet page, with at least 30 dedicated to celebrating her gorgeousness - and have led many an eager father to settle down with the kids on Saturday morning, "just to keep an eye on what you're watching".
     Times have certainly changed. Children's presenters used to be like children's party entertainers. Back when Cat was a kitten, we had Noel Edmonds on the Multi-Coloured Swapshop, Chris Tarrant on Tiswas and Mike Read on Saturday Superstore. Now they are all sexy and slightly misbehaved. They date pop stars, appear in gossip columns and fall tipsily out of members-only London clubs. One even got caught taking cocaine. Of course, Ant, Dec and Deeley don't do drugs, but "there'd be no pointtelling us not to drink or go on too many dates - it would be falling on deaf ears," she says.
     "I didn't watch Saturday morning telly as a kid - I played in a youth orchestra," admits Deeley, "so I never really saw th old guard. I did love Bagpuss, though. We had Bagpuss himself on our show recently, all yellow and faded around the edges, and we were looking at each other with tears in our eyes."
     Her childhood sounds like something out of Enid Blyton: clarinet in the youth orchestra, ballet, Brownies, horse-riding, even stamp-collecting. Who would have thought that, at the age of 22, she'd be appearing regularly in the glossy men's magazines - no 'babe poll' or issue of FHM is complete without her - talking about how much lager she drinks and how she can "kick ass" in a fight? With her background, you'd expect her to be a nice school teacher now or playing hockey for England. "But it wasn't just good girl's activities," she protests. "I also used to have beer races down the pub with the rugby lads. Like I said, I'm a mixture."
     It's hard not to suspect, however, that whatever Deeley's natural proclivities, she would be under an enormous amount of pressure to embrace the 'ladette' image. Thanks to the success of Loaded, the men's magazine is now the big launch pad for pretty TV presenters. And if you want to appear on the cover, your best bet is to pose falling out of a gold bikini while proclaiming: "I'll arm-wrestle anyone for a pint." The readers want to hear that you can pack a punch, enjoy a one-night stand and explain the offside rule. It's not something you could imagine Valerie Singleton ever contemplating, and the temptation must be huge - if you happen to be the kind of girl who likes stamp collecting and a romantic dinner - to, well, fake it.
     But Deeley vehemently denies any dissembling. "Look, I just am like that. I'm most definitely not a girlie-girl. I've always been most comfortable in a pair of dungarees, hanging around with my brother who's a manly man like my dad. I did my A-levels at a boys' grammar school."
     Deeley sees 'ladette-ism' as part of a wider social phenomenon and has a touchingly naive take on it. "People give it that title and call it a trend. But generally, men and women are getting closer together and the differences are disappearing. Weomen are almost overtaking men - we've only really been going properly for about 100 years and we're doing pretty well! Everybody's more open about sex, relationships, drinking. If you go for a night out with the girls, it can be pretty wild. I've also been out with accountants from the City, and they were really wild, so it's not just a media thing."
     Unfortunately, fun though it may be, the ability to drink as much as a man and have lots of affairs is not as much of an indicator of real equality, and female presenters are scrutinised much more than their male peers. the thin end of the wedge is the situation in which Zoe Ball found herself in May, when a newspaper published long-lens photographs of her sunbathing topless. Surely any woman would find this intrusive, if not embarrassing?
     Zoe Ball phoned the newspaper to insist that she and her fiance "loved" the snaps, but, given her fun-loving and matey image, it would have seemed out of character if she had suddenly come over "devastated and distrssed" like Sophie Rhys-Jones. the newspaper was naturally delighted with her response, gave her a little pat on the back, then published a second batch of topless pictures.
     "I don't think Zoe had to say she didn't mind about that," says Deeley carefully. "There are good and bad parts to every job, and we're paid the money to accept the deal of being in the public eye. It's like accepting the fact that you get a much broader range of reactions when you meet people. Some people are just really rude - and I do hate unnecessary rudeness - but then some people are over-the-top nice, which is nearly as bad. You don't want to be surrounded by yes-men. That's how Elvis ended up in the white rhinestone jumpsuit."
     Her own forays into the world of saucy pictures include two shoots for FHM, one last July and one for this August's collectors' edition, which features four alternative 'babe' covers - Deeley (the most covered-up, it must be said), Kelly Brook, Catherine Zeta Jones and Louise Nurding - and a fairly tame set for Sky magazine. "If people thought I was nude in those then, hello, come on, it's just pretend. I was in a bed in the middle of a studio, surrounded by people, and under the sheet I was clothed.
     "But I tell you what - I'd quite like to do Playboy. I really do fancy it. I can see myself later on in life, sitting in an old people's home in Birmingham with my lavender rinse, and I'd like to have a few stories to tell. I'd like to have met a few people, done a few things. It's not that I necessarily think it would be fun to do Playboy. But it would be something to look back on."
     For all her apparent candidness, Deeley is canny and can play up or play down aspects of herself, according to who she's talking to. For example, she tells me about an occasion when she was attempting to have a quiet drink with some friends and a man kept pinching her bottom. "One pinch you can ignore, you can turn the other cheek," she smiles. "But after three times, i turned round and, well, let's say his mates were a bit embarrassed."
     In FHM, the story appeared thus: "This guy kept pinching my ****. He got really mouthy so I went to hit him with the back of my hand and he flinched away. If I ever see him again, I guarantee I will punch him."
     She has leared the celebrity game fast. When she's working, she knows that she can swear as much as she likes on MTV - "though you can't say 'Jesus', which I discovered to my cost" - but on live children's television she has to watch every word. When she's interviewed for FHM she wheels out the lager and fighting anecdotes, and in our interview she chatters on about holidays with the family, nights in "dancing around" with the girls, and having her lovely new flat decorated. It's a smart trick. But maybe it's not that surprising, because Deeley is a smart girl. She has A-levels in English, History, Maths and General Studies, and would have gone to university had her career not taken off so quickly.
     Deeley was spotted by model agency scouts, aged 14, in the audience of The Clothes Show. She went on to win a modelling competition, but put off further work until she was 16, when she signed with the Storm agency.
     She then spent some time as a model, "which is great when you're about 18. You've got no responsibilities, nobody's interested in your opinion, you just travel the world having a laugh, meeting people and getting loads of free stuff. It taught me a lot about dealing with people and I grew up fast. But now I wouldn't like not having any creative interest in what's going on. There's a lot of standing around while people say, 'That looks really cool', and you're quietly thinking: 'But I feel a bit stupid.'"
     It was Storm that changed her name. Christened Catherine, she had always been called Kate or Katie. She says that this was purely practical as there were too many modelling Kates and Katies, but Cat certainly sounds sexier. Her big break came when she sent a homemade videotape to MTV in an attempt to become a video jockey, or VJ.
     "A lot of people watch telly and say, 'Yeah, I could do that', but they're talking rubbish. Making the tape was easy, it was having the guts to do something with it that took me ages. Even now, they laugh at me because it was so badly edited, but at least I was brave enough to send it."
     Deeley does not regret the decision to skip university. "I'm doing my dream job. My parents put the case for going, but they know I'm pretty headstrong and they're happy for me to do whatever I want."
     Her brother Max has followed a more traditional path, studying accountancy at Leeds University, but the siblings have a secret scheme. "I want to open a bar with Max in Birmingham. I don't think I could go back to live there, but Birmingham is getting pretty lively."
     In the meantime, Deeley is happily settling into her new London home. She is tearing pages out of magazines, thinking about wall colours and having cable TV installed. One thing she does not have is a computer: "I'm the kind of person who thinks that if something doesn't work you have to hit it, and if it still doesn't work then you really belt it. That's how technological I am."
     This is a shame, because she can't see her websites. On the Net, Deeley is a designated babe. The comments range from, "She is Great Britain's most beautiful lady", to the more basic, "Cat is fit". It would be something else to talk about in the old people's home in Birmingham.
     "Definitely. I'll have a captive audience then, won't I?" she winks. "I'll tell them: 'I might look old and wrinkly now, but I lived.' And all the men will be drooling."
     They're probably drooling already.