Reality TV, especially involving celebrities, is on the wane elsewhere but Davina McCall expects the sixth series of Big Brother on Channel Four to attract millions once more. Steve Pratt reports on the failed pop star who found success with the oddball world of TV popularity contests.

BIG Brother presenter Davina McCall wouldn't mind going out with Hollywood movie star George Clooney. Not because he's rich, famous and good-looking but because he once kept a pot-bellied pig. She fancied keeping pot-bellied pigs at her London home. Her husband wouldn't agree to the idea. "The point of a pot-bellied pig is that they're house pets, it's not a garden thing," she explains.

"They're tame, they're house-trained, they go out to the garden for wees and everything. But he couldn't get his head around having a pig in the house, so it's been vetoed. Unless I go out with George Clooney, who once kept a pig called Max, sadly deceased, then it's never going to happen."

What most definitely is going to happen is Big Brother 6, C4's regular summer fixture in the schedules and McCall wouldn't miss it for anything. She managed to carry on while pregnant during two previous series.

If she wasn't allowed to present it, she's be in the crowd outside the house, waving a banner and screaming excitedly. That she gets paid to turn up, meet the housemates and ask them questions is a dream job. Don't expect her to give it up lightly and pass on the torch to someone else. "They'd have to cut off my right arm and prise the torch forcibly from my hand before I'd give it to anyone," she says firmly.

She acknowledges that she has much to thank Big Brother for, not least her own celebrity status. McCall started out trying to make it as a pop star and made a record, but says it wasn't meant to be. "I can roughly sing in tune, but to be absolutely honest, my voice was by no means different enough to warrant being a singer," she says.

"One of the great things about Celine Dion - love her or loathe her - is that you know who it is the minute you hear her. Same with Mariah Carey or Joss Stone. They've got a really distinctive sound, and that's what I didn't have."

As well as BB, she's presented shows including Don't Try This At Home and Streetmate, in which she matched up random punters on the street. True romance arrived in her life in the form of a man she met walking his dog in a London park and went on to marry. They have two daughters, aged three and one.

Family life is her main priority now. "I hang out with them as much as I can," she says. "My husband has just had a complete career change, and is training to be a mountain leader and teach climbing, mountain biking and kayaking. I've been sucked into that as well because, if I don't do that, I never see him. It's brilliant, we go out like real nerds with our Ordinance Survey map and plan our routes and everything."

Her life was also altered by going to Africa for Comic Relief. "It's changed my views and outlook towards other people, and hopefully has made me less selfish and less self-absorbed. Once you've seen the utter, utter, abject poverty in the world, it puts the routine problems of one's own life into some sort of perspective," she says.

"It's the one good thing about celebrity. Well, there are lots of good things, like being able to get a table at The Ivy, but the really good thing is that you're able to affiliate your name to a cause and get a message across to people. That's an amazingly intense thing to be able to do, and I try to do that with issues I really care about."

Back at Big Brother, the obvious question concerns her favourite moments over the past six years. There's talk of Paul and Helen falling in love, Kate falling over drunk, saintly Cameron losing his temper and Nasty Nick's unmasking among many fond memories.

One of her favourite moments wasn't on camera when, after rehearsing a piece in the diary room, she was alerted that she'd left her mobile phone there. "The housemates had got hold of it - thank God it wasn't switched on - and they were all looking at it in awe, going 'it's a phone'. They were all terrified by the arrival of this piece of equipment. 'What do we do with it?', 'shall we take it?'. Anyway, Big Brother asked them to return it," she recalls.

Last year BB was won by a transsexual, so does the choice of winner say something about our society? "Just look at who's won in the past," says McCall. "The first series was Craig, but it was nearly Anna (the lesbian former nun). The second year it was Brian, who was gay. The third year was Kate, then next was Cameron, who was devoutly religious. Now who'd have thought that Cameron would win it one year and the next year a transsexual female would win?

"It's not as if there's a theme developing. We're just going for the person that we love the most. That's what I love about the Brits - it doesn't matter who you are, what you look like, what you represent, what you've been, what you've done. If we love you, we love you."

* Big Brother 6 begins on C4 tomorrow at 9pm.

Published: 26/05/2005