Flaming June

If you've ever caught June Sarpong on TV, you'll know why it's impossible to forget her. She has a gap in her front teeth that would warrant a Tannoy warning if it were on the London Underground, glossy lips as plump as sleigh-bed bolsters and, woah! That voice! A gravelly, oddly sexy, cockney brogue that slurs across several London postcodes. 'At work my voice became a bit of a running joke,' admits June. 'We'd get letters from viewers who would write in and say, "Is that girl drunk or what?" But you know what's really funny? I've never been a drinker.'

But don't be fooled by the languid delivery. Only someone with steely ambition could have shot through the ranks as speedily as Sarpong. At 26, she has presented T4 - Channel 4's youth magazine programme - every Sunday since 1999 and has now added mainstream teenage shows on Channel 4 such as Your Face or Mine(Blind Date meets Jerry Springer) and Dirty Laundry (Kilroy for teens).

By the start of 2003 June had joined Cat Deeley and Vernon Kay as part of the contemporary youth TV establishment. She was also one half of London's high-profile black power couple; dating the 30-year-old, Harvard-educated Labour MP for Tottenham David Lammy, and hanging out with the likes of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell. She never felt intimidated by their company. 'I still talked at 200mph,' she laughs. 'I used to call Alastair Campbell "Big Al" and bend his ear about the economy.' She is incredibly extrovert, throwing her head back and laughing like a drain one moment, then grabbing your leg to emphasise a point the next.

She met Lammy, who now has a new post in the Department for Constitutional Affairs, in the summer of 2001. June had attended a vote-rallying Labour Party tea party which culminated in a quiz. She won the first prize - 'Tea with David Lammy MP'. 'When I arrived at the tea I thought David was the MP's assistant. He's quite funkylooking - well, for an MP anyway,' she smiles. 'He had a girlfriend at the time so nothing happened at first.' Then she attended another Labour Party function. 'I made sure I sat next to him.' They were pretty much inseparable after that.

Sarpong had a ball while the two-year affair lasted, attending dinners with newspaper editors and politicians. 'It was enthralling to encounter these truly empowered people.' June and David, aka 'the black Blair', may have been described as 'high profile' but in truth they kept things fairly low key. 'We were never shot rolling out of the Met Bar at 4am,' she says. 'We were really boring.'

And for a rare unsmiling moment she sounds like she's missing that cosy brand of boredom. Such is Sarpong's sunny veracity, you do actually believe her when she insists that there was no one else involved in the split and that it was mainly geography - his Tottenham constituency in North London was a long way from her place in Earls Court (she has just moved to Clapham). Their gruelling work commitments also contributed. Sarpong, you see, is a veritable workaholic. Until recently she was working seven days a week, filming virtually every day at all hours.

She's been turning down offers so she can attend a writing course at Goldsmiths College and is now casting for actors to appear in her self-penned sitcom about a single girl in Ladbroke Grove looking for love. 'The problem was that me and David both worked very long hours,' she sighs. 'Our diaries were just always conflicting.'

The relentless drive to focus on work and to succeed is, it seems, the direct consequence of an awful childhood accident. Aged 15, June was hit by a car while running for her school bus. She fractured and dislocated her spine and spent 18 horizontal and very painful months in hospital. June's injuries were so bad that in order to correct her terrible dislocation she had to lie on her back with a metal frame bolted into her skull, off which hung heavy weights.
She shows me the scars on her forehead to prove it. 'I've never felt pain like it. The pressure on my skull was horrific. It was terrible,' she concurs. 'But at the same time, it was kind of productive and pivotal, too. I watched lots of Oprah which had just started on the telly and I thought, "I like that. I'll have some of that." I decided that I wanted to present. I lay there thinking to myself, "I never stop talking so to be paid to talk is, like, a dream job",' she says.

Rather than just talking about it, June pursued her goal. Her mother gave her a good start: while all the other kids on the Walthamstow council estate where she grew up went to the rough, local comprehensive (including bad boy Brian Harvey of E17 fame), her mother bent the local council rules and made sure that June attended the more academically ambitious Connaught School for Girls in E11. 'Which was basically for middle-class do-gooders,' she says.

June was born in London but her parents are Ghanaian. She grew up in Leytonstone but moved to Walthamstow aged 13. Her mother and father - nurse and property dealer respectively - split up when she was seven. 'They just grew apart,' shrugs June.