She's Outen her own

Denise Van Outen is fussing around her dressing room, backstage at the Gielgud, trying to find a vase for the flowers she is holding. 'Dawn French sent them to me,' she says. 'The card says: "From one lonely woman to another, good luck".' Is French a friend? 'No, I've never met her before. Isn't that sweet?'

It's not an entirely random luvvy act: French is starring in the one-woman show My Brilliant Divorce at the Apollo Theatre; Van Outen is about to open next door in her own one-woman show, Tell Me On A Sunday. If it had been the other way round, Van Outen would probably have popped into French's dressing room to say good luck herself.

Sending flowers to complete strangers doesn't seem quite Denise: chatting away merrily to them, however, does. You know this not only because Van Outen became famous precisely for chatting away merrily - and saucily - on The Big Breakfast, but because in person she's almost disconcertingly guileless.

With Tell Me On A Sunday - a reprisal of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1980 musical, which requires Van Outen to sing solo for 90 minutes - she's taking the biggest gamble of her career. She admits it as easily as she talks about her heartbreak over Jay Kay (the Jamiroquai singer from whom she split in 2001), speed-dating in New York and push-up bras.

She's prepared for the critics not to like the show, and is trying to see her performance in showbusiness terms instead. 'If I bring in fans from The Big Breakfast and they like it, then I'll feel I've achieved something great,' she says.

Van Outen's celebrity is famously self-made. She paid to put herself through drama school from the age of 13, and made a calculated decision a few years later to go into TV, having failed an audition for Sandy in Grease. 'I realised that to get the good parts in theatre you have to have a name,' she says.

It was an inspired move: the camera loved her and, moreover, Van Outen always seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Having stood in for Sharron Davis for a week doing The Big Breakfast's weather reports, she soon found herself co-presenting the entire show with Johnny Vaughan.

'I loved that,' she says now. 'Not many people can say they look forward to going to work, but I'd get up at 3am and by 4am I'd be in stitches. The Big Breakfast was my social life.'

Van Outen is aware she hasn't lived an ordinary life, that she has, as she puts it, grown up in public. But fame doesn't worry her: she's used to being recognised and is happy to talk about herself and it's almost as though both factors protect her from undue press attention.

There would be no point, for example, sending Benji the Binman through Denise's dustbin because she'd probably stand on the kitchen step and hand the contents to him herself.