ROB ADAMS profiles Isla St Clair, best known for her television work but now opening the world of traditional Scottish music to an eager audience

FOR many people, Isla St Clair will forever represent the cheery, chirpy lass on the Generation Game, delivering mothers and sons, fathers and daughters into Larry Grayson's camp charge, whereupon their lack of oneness with the potter's wheel, or some such, would be cruelly exposed.

For others, she was, at 19, Scottish traditional singing's great bright hope of her generation.

St Clair herself would be happy to be regarded as Isla St Clair, singer and television presenter. Simple as that.

In conversation (I'd been warned she likes a good blether), while she takes an obvious professional pride in her light entertainment work, she lapses easily and quite unaffectedly into the patois of her native North-east. And though she stops short of singing down the line from her Northamptonshire home, her love for and knowledge of North-east ballads and songs remains incontestable.

These songs are, after all, in her blood. According to her mother, poet and songwriter Zetta, St Clair was singing songs, mainly psalms of the fisherfolk, before she could talk.

When her mother became a founding member of Aberdeen Folk Club, St Clair went along too and, aged 10, got up to sing. Two years later she was captured on film, singing at a School of Scottish Studies concert in Edinburgh, a performance that led to many other offers of work.

So began an odyssey of folk club gigs, concerts, television appearances, and tours abroad, with her mother on hand as chaperone and - as Billy Connolly once described her - supercrit.

The road from singing Herrin's Heid for folk audiences to acting as Larry Grayson's foil on Saturday tea-time television was negotiated via a series of accidents and invitations, beginning with Grampian Television's suggestion she present, sing and tell stories in her own series, Isla's Island.

Six programmes grew into 35. Then came three months spent touring America in a Greyhound bus with a Scotland on Parade cast, including Tony Roper and Alastair MacDonald, quickly followed by a similar slog round the Soviet Union.

This pattern of work continued until, at 25 and feeling that she was going round in circles, she decided she wanted a proper job. She went to STV and asked for a job as a continuity announcer. ``Sure,'' they said, ``you can do it. But you'll go nuts.'' They gave her a series, Birthday Honours, instead.

Generation Game producer Alan Boyd spotted her and asked her to audition. With her fresh face and her naturally friendly manner she helped the show maintain its high ratings. The vivaciousness was just an act, though. Her teenage marriage to a folk musician was over, and behind the ready smile she was miserable a lot of the time.

The Generation Game had good and bad spinoffs. Her BBC 1 series The Song and the Story, in which she sang and acted out some of her favourite traditional songs, won the Prix Jeunesse award in Munich for best television light entertainment, and a two-year job on Central Television's Saturday Show followed.

St Clair has always felt that a way can be found to combine the media personality with the folk singing persona, to draw people towards the latter on the strength of the former. Judging from her six-show series for Radio 2 last year, Tatties and Herrin', she may well be right.

Slipping effortlessly between Ian Olson's concise but thoroughly researched scripts and relevant songs, and in front of an English village audience, she brought the past 300 years of North-east farming and fishing more vividly to life than any school history lesson I can remember.

After the response to her Edinburgh Festival performance last year, Edinburgh International Folk Festival has booked her for two concerts. She should not be too surprised if more inquiries follow.

n Isla St Clair appears at Teviot House, Edinburgh, with Aileen Carr and Ian Olson on Sunday and with Sheena Wellington and Gordeanna McCulloch on Monday.