'I'm a ruthless workaholic'

Interior designers are suckers for exotic plants, and Linda Barker, the woman who used to put the Tuscan orange - not to mention the driftwood grey and the banana yellow - into the BBC's Changing Rooms, is no exception. Standing in her sleepy East Dulwich street, you can spot her house - a tall, white, Victorian number - a mile off, simply by virtue of the abundance of spikey green things growing beside her front door.

Inside, what strikes you first is the lack of colour. On television, she may think nothing of slapping a load of purple paint all over an MDF cabinet, but in her own home the mood aims at pale and calming. The walls are off-white, the floors mostly marble and blonde wood. Design clichés abound: there are shells, bits of coral, chandeliers, lots of curly fretwork and, more bizarrely, an enormous statue of Buddha. At the back is a pond and plenty of decking.

"Yes," Barker says, looking around the place contentedly. "Bleached-out, seaside colours are definitely me. But I'd never do something to someone else's home that I didn't believe in 100 per cent."

Right now, of course, Barker's makeover skills are on hold. She gave up Changing Rooms last year in order to pursue other more commercial interests after the offers came rolling in following her flirty stint in the jungle for I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here! (a new series of which is due to air in less than two weeks). Since then, she has done adverts for Currys (annoyingly naff), DFS (displaying an appalling taste in sofas) and Asda (she modelled undies for the supermarket chain); she has launched her own home-accessories catalogue (seashells at £9 a throw); she has filmed a cringe-making ITV series, With A Little Help From My Friends (in which celebrities, including her "mate", former England cricketer Phil Tufnell, get in touch with old school friends and construct buildings for charity); and she has launched a yoga video. Total earnings over the past 12 months? Some £2 million, if the gossip is to be believed.

Does she worry that she is now too ubiquitous, that her advertising work in particular has served only to make her appear grasping and ruthless? "Well, at DFS, I'm involved with the designs, so I've got integrity there. We're creating new ranges. We're using new fabrics and cushions and even throws! So I will back DFS to the hilt."

What about Currys? The advert, which features Linda snipping an imaginary pair of scissors to the jingle "always cutting prices", was voted one of the year's biggest turkeys by the advertising industry itself. "Currys was straightforward endorsement but, with hindsight ... well, I didn't know they were going to make so many blimmin' ads, did I? The trouble is, if you are on TV and you make a mistake, it's there for all to see. It's been a hard lesson. After I came out of the jungle, I was so busy. It was flattering. I'd think, 'Oh yes, I've got to do that. Now I know you can be too busy.'"

Is she ambitious? Barker, whose smile never falters, not even for a nanosecond, flashes her flinty blue eyes at me. "I make the most of any situation in which I find myself. I like to do the best I can. That's the way I was brought up. But I'm not crawling over other people to get where I want to be."

The idea that she deliberately changed the way she looked before she went into the jungle is, she insists, total rot. She was as fit as a fiddle and pipe-cleaner skinny long before that. "I laughed at those articles. They were so off the mark. Then there was the Phil thing [it was rumoured that she and Phil Tufnell, the eventual winner of I'm a Celebrity, were a little bit too matey]. That was off the mark, too, so obviously idiotic. He's a lovely guy, a great mate. But lovers? No. I'm married with a child. Television is the safest place on earth to flirt. You're so secure." Was her husband, a TV executive whom she met at art school, ruffled by the stories?

"It didn't bother him. He's a laid-back guy. When it started to irritate me, he told me to chill out. We're fine, really."

Close your eyes and, thanks to her Yorkshire accent, Barker sounds as homely and warm as an old blanket, the kind she might hurl casually over the back of a sofa. But, in truth, she is as canny as they come. The hair is bleached blonde, the waist tiny (she credits this not to dieting, but to her passion for yoga, to which she devotes many hours of her time). Her manner is bubbly and, ostensibly, unguarded - but you struggle in vain to get her to say anything remotely controversial, even when it comes to her pet subject: taste.

When I asked her, for instance, what she most hated about British people's homes - swirly carpets? Brown velour sofas? - she thought for a while and then said: "Not a lot. I even like rooms with clutter in them, like cosy English parlours, though they wouldn't do for me."

Barker, who is 42, grew up in a village near Bradford, the daughter of a farmer. After school, she studied fine art at the West Surrey College of Art and Design. In her twenties, she married Chris and, together, they bought their first home, a flat in Battersea (their daughter, Jessica, is now 10). It was at this point that she discovered her passion for all things interior.

"I did up our home and loved it. But I needed money. I wanted a house and a car. So I worked for friends, and then for friends of friends, and finally I was able to start charging serious money and to build up a portfolio. Then I was approached to do Changing Rooms. I thought: I'll see how far I can go with this. When they offered me the job, I was incredulous. But people said I was a natural right from the beginning, in spite of the shaking." Does she enjoy being recognised? "I wouldn't be in this business if I hated it."

Barker seems to be all too aware that, as a television presenter, she may have a limited shelf life. But, she insists, this doesn't worry her a jot. "I don't need to be high-profile," she says. "That doesn't fuel me. I don't need my own TV shows."

So where does she see herself in 10 years' time? "Well, my dream is to be able to do the scorpion, which is a really fantastic yoga position." She hoots with laughter. "No, seriously. My mail-order catalogue is my baby - that's where I've invested my money. But if we're talking dreams, I'd love to do a little boutique hotel, with yoga courses and a spa and a great bar. I'm a worker. I like work. It switches me on. I'm very lucky because for most people, that spark is very difficult to find."

She smiles broadly, and hugs her knees. "Honestly, we're a very normal family. I'm very grounded. I don't lead a celebrity lifestyle. But then, I suppose every celebrity says that, don't they?"

With A Little Help From My Friends is on ITV tonight at 9pm.