I love being a soccer babe

With eyes twitching and a bobbed haircut blunter than a Yorkshireman's tongue, Tanya Turner surveys the room slightly anxiously. Imperious in Gucci (or is it Versace?), she sits, ramrod straight, plotting her next move. A mound of cocaine is before her, and, Tanya being Tanya, she can resist temptation no longer. Eyeing her impressively long acrylic talons, she suddenly swoops down, scoops a pile of coke into her fingernail and snorts greedily. Oh yes. Footballers' Wives is most definitely back.

If you didn't catch last night's episode of the drama based on the fictional exploits of Earl's Park FC and the players' families, you missed a glossy magazine photo-shoot, a dead body in the swimming pool, a host of lavishly ridiculous outfits and, of course, Tanya's nails - now such a key fixture of the show, they probably have an agent and dressing room all to themselves.

So when actress Zoe Lucker bounds into the Islington restaurant to discuss her alter ego, I almost miss her, dressed down as she is in khaki combat trousers, jacket and trainers, and with her fingernails a good footanda-half shorter than they are on the show.

"Honestly," says Zoe, plonking herself down on the chair and ordering a glass of wine, "I couldn't carry on my day-to-day life with nails like Tanya's. I'd go mad! They're so impractical." Ah, but practicality and Footballers' Wives hardly make comfortable bedfellows.

When the show's first series came out last year, audiences watched in awe as one ludicrous story line after another tumbled on to our screens. We saw Kyle (Gary Lucy) and Chardonnay (Susie Amy) - Footballers' Wives' answer to Posh and Becks - getting hitched in a wedding ceremony so garish, it made the Beckhams' affair look positively anaemic. We saw Donna and Ian Walmsley (Katharine Monaghan and Nathan Constance) pay £500,000 to the man who kidnapped their daughter without actually getting her back (doh!), and we saw the Macbeths of the show, Tanya and Jason Turner (Zoe and Cristian Solimeno), attempt to murder Earl's Park's chairman, Frank Laslett (John Forgeham), only to see him regain consciousness and his predilection for overacting.

As a show, it is crass, silly and preposterous; the characters seedy, amoral and, at best, shallow. And yet? And yet we can't stop watching it, dammit! Even sensible Germaine Greer wrote a piece, solemnly declaring that the show was a hit, elevated from the status of being a mere "animated photo spread from Hello! magazine" by its central message, "that old favourite: that money cannot buy happiness".

"Well, when you've got Germaine Greer deconstructing the show," says Zoe wisely, "you know you're on to something, don't you?" Altogether prettier and softer featured than the hard-faced, almost bloodless Tanya, 28-year-old Zoe is undoubtedly the show's star. While lads might gawp at Susie Amy's embonpoint, it is Tanya and her preposterous scheming that keep audiences hooked. Zoe's certainly come a long way from Huddersfield, where she grew up with her father, a stained-glass-window designer, mother, two brothers and sister. Zoe cites her close-knit family as her most important influence and insists they would put her straight down if she started getting too starry.

"I've always wanted to act and I love practising my job. God, I nearly said 'craft' then, and if I ever started taking myself too seriously, my friends and family would call me all sorts of things, so that would be the end of that, frankly," she guffaws.

"But I really like Tanya," continues Zoe, her thick Yorkshire accent reverberating around the restaurant. "I would definitely have her as a friend because, yes, her behaviour is sometimes appalling and, yes, she does sometimes try to kill people, but she is also quite vulnerable too, and I think viewers like that. They like her hitting rock bottom because it means she'll have to fight her way back up again. She'll do anything to cling on to her life as a footballer's wife, and so, in a way, viewers condone her behaviour because they can see that desperate need of hers.

"Even when I'm out with friends, we'll all end up discussing her as if she's a real person because she's just so interesting. Even my mum's friends say to me, 'Why are you still with Jason?' We all know it's not real, and we all know the show is hugely tongue-in-cheek, but for that hour, it provides a real bit of escapism."

Escapism, yes, but Footballers' Wives provides more than just that. We might peer down our noses at these ghastly characters, and we certainly wouldn't want them living next door, but let's face it, if we had the money and the chance to let rip and live as trashily and amorally as they do, wouldn't we? And with an indoor swimming pool, too!

Oh, I get loads of people coming up to me and saying they'd like to be in Footballers' Wives, although they're not actual footballers' wives themselves. It obviously hit a nerve with people because it has the right ingredients - these days we're all obsessed with famous people and money, and football unites people like nothing else can. And when you have good-looking actors, lovely clothes, glamorous settings and fast cars, you've pretty much got the lot. I suppose you could call it the Dallas or Dynasty of its time.

"It's funny that people refer to it as tabloid TV because, actually, the broadsheets were the first press to respond positively towards it. They recognised that a huge amount of things in the show were tongue-in-cheek, but they also saw that the show raises serious issues, too."

Does it? Zoe cites a story line in this second series where Kyle's mother, Jackie (Gillian Taylforth), gives birth to a baby (fathered by Tanya's husband, Jason - do keep up), which turns out to be a hermaphrodite. "And we raise an important issue in a highly sensitive way," says Zoe. "We make people aware who might otherwise not be that some people are born with both male and female sex organs." But rumours abound that some of the actors threatened to walk out because they thought the story line too far-fetched.

So has her fictional lifestyle got to her - has Zoe quietly turned into a footballer's wife? Well, she is wearing sunglasses perched atop her head a la Tanya, and at one stage refers to herself in the third person ("My private life is for Zoe Lucker and no one else"), but otherwise appears to be rather down to earth and extremely friendly, remarking jokingly that "Tanya is a much better actress than me". But there's no doubt that her life has changed beyond recognition. From bit parts in Coronation Street and Where the Heart Is, she is now in one of TV's hottest shows, photographed wherever she goes and earning a six-figure salary. "And I love it!" she says.

She tells you gleefully how she has just managed to buy her first house, in north London, and how she loves people chatting to her in the street about the show. "I get a load of fan mail, especially from women and gay men [straight men, terrified of her character, approach her a lot less now], and I like to write back to everyone because it only takes two minutes, doesn't it? Footballers' Wives has been a dream come true for me, but being a celebrity isn't what drives me and I just want to maintain a lifestyle that I feel comfortable with.

"It's funny, but Playboy even offered me £30,000 to do a centrefold. My agent just laughed and I screamed, 'Only £30,000?'" Zoe guffaws. "Cheeky bastards! But I suppose playing Tanya has been very liberating for me. Before I started playing her, I didn't have that much confidence in my body, and if I was by a pool, say, I'd always walk around with a sarong.

"But because of her character and because of the sex scenes I have to do, I just have to take a deep breath and tell myself I look all right, and so I'm a lot less conscious about my figure." And does she get many sex scenes this series? "Well, I end up in bed with the new signing [Darius Fry, played by 17-year-old newcomer Peter Ash], which must have been terrifying for the poor bloke." Zoe stops suddenly. "God, 17 is legal, isn't it?" she giggles.

She wouldn't, she says, "want to be a footballer's wife for the sake of it, and I have absolutely no intention of going out and finding myself a footballer", and she concedes that she wouldn't go within a mile of Jason Turner himself - "I'd think he was such an idiot".

Show insiders remarked, however, that the chemistry between Zoe and the actor Cristian Solimeno was such that many thought they were an item in real life. "But we really are just good friends," Zoe insists. "When you're working so closely with that number of people, you have to be extremely careful. Relationships can go horribly wrong, and if you're doing a job, why take that risk and mess up your life?"

Some suggested, though, that Zoe had been having an affair with Solimeno and that the relationship - strenuously denied by Zoe - ended her marriage to estate agent Richard Forshaw.

The couple married in July 2000 and separated just 15 months later. " I'd been with Richard for five years and I would never take those years back. I had a nice time in the marriage, even though it didn't last long, and Richard is a good bloke. I had some very happy times with him, although the break-up was a very difficult period."

Was it her decision to leave? She sighs. "Yes, it was my decision rather than his, and I had to leave because it was the right thing to do for both of us. I don't think Richard was very happy at the time, although it's amicable." Would Zoe consider remarrying? "To be honest, it's not something I'm thinking about at the moment." She does, however, have a new boyfriend, although she refuses to name him "for fear of jinxing it".

"He's not an actor or a footballer and it's very early days yet. I love the fact that we met in very normal circumstances and that he'd never even seen the programme and didn't know who I was. That was the best way really, because I know that he likes me for me. Is it love?" Zoe blushes. "Who knows? I certainly care very deeply about him and I wouldn't change a single thing in my life at the moment. How many people are lucky enough to say that?"