LINDA Barker was a businesswoman before she was a TV personality, working as a self-employed designer, and that side of her has never been more apparent. Sitting in the comfortable surroundings of Notting Grill, the London restaurant of her friend Antony Worrall Thompson, Barker looks relaxed after a meeting with the licensees of her recently launched mail order catalogue Really Linda Barker.
''I do have a good business head,'' she says. ''I like doing the mail order catalogue because I like selecting products and I like to know how things are run. Like anything I do, I hope it does well and I always give it 100 per cent.''
Barker, 42, has certainly been giving 100 per cent in recent months. Ever since she emerged from the Australian jungle, typically cheerily, at the end of last year's series of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, she doesn't seem to have been off our screens.
The Yorkshire-born star might not have won the show - she came third behind Phil Tufnell and John Fashanu - but she proved popular enough to get a deluge of job offers upon her return to the UK.
''I think I know when to say no,'' she says in her defence. ''I don't do everything. I just thought I would work with this intensity while the work was coming in and it was really positive stuff. It was to do with my profile in the jungle, there was no doubt about that. These opportunities wouldn't have arisen in, say, six months' time, so I have been working really hard. Now I'm starting to get the balance back.''
Barker has received plenty of bad press for her level of work since I'm A Celebrity, with critics saying she is now suffering from overexposure, and her adverts for electrical chain Currys were recently voted the most irritating ever in a poll. But Barker shrugs off the criticism.
''I think there's always a danger of overexposure,'' she says. ''It's a fine line and hopefully I haven't crossed that. But if it has gone over, and I'm not sure it has, then it will always balance out. It has just been an incredibly busy year and I think the more you are on TV, the easier it is for people to take a pop at you.
''That hasn't really happened a lot, just the occasional journalist who talks about overexposure. The general public are very much behind me and usually say, 'Good for you' and 'Go for it'.''
Over Christmas, Barker fronted the one-off magic show Magician Impossible and is currently appearing in With A Little Help From My Friends, in which celebrities seek out old school friends to help them with seemingly impossible tasks.
One of the guests on the show is her fellow I'm A Celebrity contestant and flirting partner, Phil Tufnell.
''It was good fun, he's just such a lovely guy,'' says Barker. ''When we met for With A Little Help it was nice actually because I got an opportunity to meet all his mates and all his old school friends.''
Whether we'll see a repeat of Barker and Tuffers' much talked about flirting remains to be seen. Barker has denied that there was any romantic feelings between her and the former England cricketer but says she wasn't surprised by the speculation when she came out of the jungle.
''When I was in there, because we got on so well, I did think the press would make something of it,'' she admits. ''There was no big love story going on within the group and there was no big falling out, so I started thinking, what will the story be?''
Barker is in fact happily married to her TV producer husband Chris Short, with whom she has a daughter Jessica, aged ten. The family have become good friends with that of Worrall Thompson since he and Barker appeared on I'm A Celebrity together.
''We've become really close, and with Jay, Antony's wife,'' says Barker. ''They're really nice people. In fact I haven't got a gripe with any of the people from that show. It's a very unique relationship we all have because it's such a weird one.''
Before I'm A Celebrity, Barker was best known for being one of the experts on makeover show Changing Rooms but she had started to feel it was time to move on. And the reality show offered the perfect platform to do so. ''If I'm truthful about it, I went in because I wanted to explore new television,'' she says. "You weigh things up and I thought it would be okay. It was actually phenomenal.''
Barker has left Changing Rooms far behind to concentrate on the wide range of projects she is now involved in. She recently released a yoga video, Simple Yoga, but she insists she's not jumping on the celebrity fitness video bandwagon.
''There are a lot of celebrity fitness videos out there,'' she concedes. ''But I looked at other videos and this is different in the fact that I'm hosting it, I'm the one that you see doing the exercises and it's my voice that takes you through them.
''I was quite adamant that if I was to do an exercise video, it should look different to what people had seen before. I didn't want to turn up and just do a routine, I wanted to work hard to take people through it properly.''
This year Barker will be back doing what she does best on a brand new design show called Under Construction for ITV1. But no doubt we will see her continuing her recent success in a number of other projects.
''I never really know what's at the end of a phone call,'' she says. ''And that's nice because you don't plan your life in your diary months ahead. Things always crop up and it's always nice to have a new challenge.''
l With A Little Help From My Friends is on Thursdays on ITV1 (The Phil Tufnell episode is on this week).
l Linda Barker's Simple Yoga video and DVD is available now
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