Dear Denise...

DENISE is sitting in a chair in her enormous living room in East Boldon, near Sunderland, recounting one of many anecdotes that dominate her speech. She takes another sip of coffee - she drinks two cups inside an hour - and with a smile that draws you in and puts you instantly at ease, recalls a meeting with a man who used to watch her on This Morning.

Now doing well in his career, he once skipped school and saw the show, and heard Denise, in typical style, chastise another schoolboy truant. Without a word he left the house and headed back to join his class, and as he later told Denise, had never missed another day.

When she reflects on things like this it is with awe and modest pride. She knows that being on This Morning - the TV show which brought her fame and which she's been with since the start - has helped her reach a massive audience with her common sense advice. It is with this idea in mind, and knowing how the programme's name is well respected by the public, that under the banner of This Morning, she's helped produce some self-help books.

Yet far from simply making use of what's become a national brand, Denise was adamant the books should be of merit in themselves. She didn't write the bulk herself but had executive control. "I've edited them and written part of them because they very much had to have the This Morning ethos, which is of not telling people what to do," she says. "I feel that for a lot of the people who come to us with problems, one of the biggest problems is they've lost their self-esteem, and if you say 'do this, do that' you're in a sense reinforcing the idea that they can't act for themselves. I wanted the books to lay out all the options but not issue diktats."

The only downside to the project has been the time it has consumed. Denise worked seven days a week for the duration of six months and this put paid to other writing (she is a novelist as well, and tries to write a book a year) and left no scope for recreation. This would show stamina enough in someone half Denise's age, but for a woman who admits she's had a bus pass for some time, it seems a feat of great endurance. Yet she's no stranger to hard work, and though she lives in comfort now, it hasn't always been that way.

Denise was born in the North-East (she's still an avid football fan, supporting Sunderland, where she's from) and pretty early in her life, faced being widowed with a son. It was her need to make a living that encouraged her to write and fairly soon, she found her work was proving lucrative enough. Then she got married once again - to dad and widower Jack Tomlin, whose four young sons she made her own - but with her happiness complete, Jack also died while in his prime. When she looks back on this dark time she knows how destitute she was.

"At times in my life I've known extreme shortages of money, and I remember emailing the author of the book on debt saying 'I wish I'd had this book all those years ago'," reflects Denise. "I wrote my autobiography last year because again and again I get letters which say 'you give me hope because you have survived quite a lot' and I wanted people to see that you can go through some unhappy times and then come out and be supremely happy. My whole story is of being cast down and then managing to clamber up again."

How she became an agony aunt was more by chance than conscious effort. She'd written features on her life and all the hardships she'd endured, and people started writing letters which she answered "as a friend". Then she was offered a new job as Metro Radio's agony aunt and this led onto solving problems on Breakfast Time on television. She joined This Morning 20 years ago, and says she never planned to stay.

"I said I would come for six months," says Denise sardonically. "One of the reasons why I've stayed in television into my bus pass days is that you have the power to achieve things. When I went to Africa and made a film about children in Uganda, 564 people sponsored a child, so there are now 564 Ugandan children going to school and getting fed. I'm very proud of the set up of This Morning because nobody is fobbed off. We sometimes have people writing to us or telephoning us for six months."

Another reason why she's keen to keep her slot within the programme is the support that is forthcoming from the team of which she's part. She says Fern Britton and Phillip Schofield are as nice as they appear and that they really proved their worth when she was recently bereaved. "One of my sons, John, died of cancer last year and without Fern and Phillip I wouldn't have got through it," admits Denise, who still gets tearful at the memory. "They made it possible for me to keep working - if they hadn't been there, I couldn't have gone back."

One question people often ask is if she finds her work depressing. She will admit she gets upset - "doing a book about bereavement during the time that John was ill and dying wasn't the easiest thing I've done in my life," Denise says pointedly - but claims the huge job satisfaction makes the pain of it worthwhile. It's clear she's perfect for the role: her caring nature is apparent, and more than this, she says her past is an invaluable resource. "I think you have to have lived," says Denise of solving people's problems. "I quite often get letters from people saying 'I would like to be an agony aunt' and I think the danger is that you will be judgmental. If you've been in a few fine messes yourself you realise that it's not so easy to manage to escape every problem in life."

In terms of what the future holds Denise is happy to continue. She may be quite advanced in age, but her enjoyment hasn't waned, and ITV is keen to keep her for at least another year. Her private life is now complete with Bryan Thubron as her husband (the pair were friends when they were young and "fell in love at second sight") and with a large and growing family, she is never on her own. So can she ever see a time when she will contemplate retirement? From what she says it seems she can't.

"The thing that really frightens me is the thought of being bored," says Denise. "You can't make a living out of the human race without getting attached to it and I really don't have any desire to retire and live shut away from the world. I just have a very good life."

n The eight titles in the This Morning series, including Beat Your Addiction, Get Out Of Debt and Cope With Infertility, are published by Hodder Arnold, priced £7.99 each.