When life's always smiles better

In the six years since, Carol has become resident on the type of successful, soft-centred mainstream TV series that pointy-headed TV critics either love to ignore or to deride. Carol's buffed her tan on holiday shows such as The Travel Show. She had her own cosy celebrity chat series, Smillie's People. She helmed the Wednesday-night lottery bash. She currently presents the nation's favourite home make-over prog, Changing Rooms.

In addition, for eight weeks on BBC1, from the middle of January, Carol will be hosting a new series which seeks to blend travel with home make-over with docu-soap, Holiday Swaps. As its title suggests, the show is based upon ordinary folk exchanging their holidays with those of complete strangers.

Sedate Orkney-bound birdwatchers thus wind up ''having it large'' amid the E-raddled dancefloor posses of Ibiza, and vice versa. Metropolitan good-time girls muddy their manicures to save Japan's rural environment; dungaree'd academic conservationists shop for frillies in Manhattan.

Throughout this new show, Carol Smillie will live up to her name by doing what she always has done in every photo and TV show she's ever been in: she'll smile a warm and wholesome mega-watt smile.

So, when I met Carol Smillie last week at the launch of Holiday Swaps I began by asking her . . . no, that's wrong. I didn't begin by asking her anything at all. I actually began by slyly clocking the sharp and subtle conjunction of angles and planes which go to make up Carol Smillie's face, her retrousse nose, her definitive cheek bones - naturally I'm talking as a detached aesthete and not a drooling lech here, you understand.

Nor could I help noticing that Carol's tight leather trousers and cropped cardie sit well upon the slimness of her delicate form - she can't possibly have borne three children within the past five years, the last one only three months ago, in September, can she?

Having got that personal confession of voyeurism out of the way, I can state that I began my questioning by asking her whether, for the sake of her credibility among self-styled hipsters like me, she'd ever considered changing her name to Carol Seriously.

It wasn't the best joke in the world, but, nevertheless, Carol smiled, even managing some polite laughter. This is because Carol Smillie is a polite, determined, and thoughtful person; a pro with a firm grasp of what it is she's good at, and no mug.

She first demonstrated this blend of realism and self-awareness during an unhappy year at Glasgow School of Art. ''I'd gone there because I wanted to be a fashion designer, and yet it soon dawned on me that I wasn't going to be one . . . there was a shocking realisation that I wasn't wacky enough,'' says Carol, born and raised in downhome Cathcart.

''I'd wanted art to be about painting . . . to be more like it had been at school, at Hutchesons', but I found myself feeling a complete square peg in a round hole at college, surrounded by weird people with pink hair and funny shoes. It was very worrying in that I'd worked very hard to get to art school, and I thought I'd achieved the impossible by making it.''

Carol was asked to repeat the year or do something else. Having subsidised her grant with part-time modelling, she chose to model full-time. Her parents were horrified.

''They thought it was a cover for a surreptitious, dark world of pornography,'' says Carol. It wasn't. ''I did photographic sessions for the Record and the Evening Times. I'm a bit short for fashion modelling, but I did do some. I did promotions, which is the only way for models in Scotland to pay their mortgage.''

Suddenly, however, Carol went from

wearing a too-tight satin trouser-suit and attempting to squirt perfume on passers-

by in department stores to being a

well-kent tellyperson.

''I took Wheel Of Fortune on as another modelling job, but then quickly fell between two stools. I was a known face on a show which at the time attracted 12 million viewers, so I couldn't continue to model anonymously - but at the same time I didn't have any other TV work outside the five days per year in which we filmed all 25 Wheel Of Fortune shows.''

She therefore wrote begging letters to local radio stations, getting gigs with

West Sound and then Radio Clyde on what she modestly reckons was the sole basis of her affordability.

Janet Street Porter then proved to be Carol's TV saviour by giving her work as a reporter on The Holiday Show. ''God bless her. I'd never met her but she took the risk of a game-show hostess turning out to be a normal person.''

It's risky when your very normalcy turns

you into a celebrity, of course, as Carol

now knows.

''There are numerous advantages, and they outweigh the negatives. If you're in people's living rooms three nights a week, they feel they know you, and so they're on your side when you're shuffling about lost in the supermarket; when you're running late for a plane; when you're complaining about something.

''Your face or name opens doors. But then there are intrusions into your private life. If it's me or my husband, Alex, then fair enough. You get knocking stories, and nine times out of 10 they're just because it's your turn. You ride the storm. It's tomorrow's chip paper.

''But I don't want my children photographed . . . sure, OK! did stunning pictures of each of them when they were born, and I know that we wouldn't have bothered to have them professionally photographed. Now, though, I can't take them swimming in the school holidays, which is sad.''

Do you accept that folk might get a

bit suspicious about TV's perma-smiling Carol Smillie?

''One of my biggest laughs of the year was seeing the episode of The Royle Family where they're watching Changing Rooms - 'Carol Smillie, my arse!' Of course, I'm not bubbly all the time. I'm often as grumpy and objectionable as anybody else. I don't always grin ear to ear. I'm boringly normal. The thing is that I'm not naturally rude. I don't try to be offensive.

''Likewise, I think people have now seen enough docu-soaps to be able to spot a phony, and if I start trying to be witty when I'm not, doing contrived gags written by somebody else, it won't wash.''

The most surprising thing about Carol Smillie?

''A couple of years ago, for fun, I did a Wednesday-night course in figurative sculpture at Glasgow Art School. It was great not to have the pressure I'd felt before.''

Celebrity's best reward?

''When This Is Your Life somehow got Luther Vandross to record me a personal message. I was stunned.''

Not being voted Rear Of The Year for 1998? ''That was just a laugh. People can get too politically correct about things . . . it tickled me, especially as I'd

just had baby number two. I only got a small silver plate, though. Not even big enough

to sit on.''

Having celebrated her 38th birthday last Friday, Carol Smillie is plainly at the peak of her professional standing within the BBC, with TV insiders confidently predicting her announcement later this year as the focus of a big, big show.

Additionally, she's liked and respected by her TV fellow workers. ''She's not at all

starry, plus she's excellent at what she does,'' says one.

''She knows her market, which is Hello! and OK! rather than The New Statesman, and she caters to it well. If anyone's going to be on OK!'s cover, surely it's good that it's a Scot like her, one who can make fun of herself.''

Indeed she can. ''I must be the only person with two Gotcha Oscars, gold and platinum, from Noel Edmonds's House Party,''

Carol admits.

''The first was for being tricked into making an outfit out of paper in five minutes and then wearing it. The second was for thinking there was a real reason for my being in Shetland for two days, being followed by loonies holding a banner that said 'Shetland Welcomes Carol Smilly'.''

Smilly, Smiley, Smillie. Seriously, by any other surname this Carol would always beam as professionally luminous.