Is he the new Chris Evans?

"It was nice doing important things in life like going to the tip, which made me feel very manly. In fact, I might make an outside live broadcast from the tip. I'm going to write that down." He writes "The Tip Show" on a scrap of paper in front of him, underscored with a big, bold arrow.

His daughter kept him in his early morning routine ("She gets up about half-five so I haven't had any lieins") and he has loved the time he's had to spend with her. "For years I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a dad. My wife was broody so I bought her a dog, but that didn't help so I bought her another. I thought, 'We're going to be surrounded by dogs soon.' But the moment Ruby was born I was suckered. I absolutely love being a dad. I'm going to miss not being there in the morning. When she's in her cot and starts chattering to herself, it's like birdsong, it's the best sound in the world."

He doesn't sound like he was much help before Ruby arrived though. For five weeks before she was born, he used his wife's home birthing pool as a hot tub ("We had to put it in the front room. I would get in it in the evenings, pour myself a beer and watch TV. It was brilliant") and when his wife went into hospital, he says he made her so angry by reading the newspaper in the delivery room and eating all the sandwiches he'd brought for them that she went into labour. He laughs when he says this but he's not joking. He says he's "in talks" with his wife about having another child.

O'Connell grew up in Winchester with his younger sister. His parents, he says, have "proper jobs" (his father works for a landscaping company and his mother is a nurse). He admits he does feel a certain amount of guilt when he goes home and sees how hard his mother works, when his job "is just having a laugh on the radio".

He wasn't always a show-off. "I was actually quite quiet as a kid," he says. "Then, at secondary school, there were a couple of funny kids in my class and I started to muck around with them and I realised how much power you could have by making people laugh."

At college, O'Connell did six months of hospital radio but was sacked for playing a punk record - supposedly a request from a 79-year-old patient called Elsie - then stopping it halfway through, saying: "I'm sorry but Elsie has just passed away and no longer wants to listen to that." A month later, he was sacked from his college radio station for reading out a letter he had made up from a teacher explaining his crush on one of the students.

He went to Nottingham Trent University "because in the brochure, it said the ratio of women to men was six to one. I thought: 'Fantastic, this is going to be an orgy for three years.' I really struggled to find those six women who were allocated to me."

O'Connell had started doing stand-up comedy while still a student ("Well, I was standing up, but it wasn't comedy") and continued to do it by night when he moved to London and took a sales job. "It was going nowhere," he says. "The defining moment was at a manky pub in Camden. The compere was called The Cot Death Kid. There were six people in the pub, three of whom worked there. The others were alcoholics who had probably been there since the pub opened in the Seventies. Two of them had a fight during my act. I was stood there on a milk crate talking to myself."

By then, he had met Sarah through mutual friends and she encouraged him to take a sales job at a radio station. At a work party, O'Connell got drunk, approached the head of the station and persuaded him to let him audition for a DJ job in Bournemouth. He got it.

His success has been steady - before he landed the Xfm job, he did a stint on a radio station in Liverpool - but he says it's his wife who keeps his feet on the ground. "She was a big kick up the arse, she still is. She's my most honest and harsh critic."

He is obviously very happily married (it's been seven years) but doesn't he ever wish he was single and living a rock 'n' roll DJ life in London? "It is weird sometimes when girls are extra friendly to you. But I remember what it was like before I did this. When I was at university the girls weren't there. I was incredibly lucky to meet my wife and she's been the big thing that's helped get me this far so I owe her a lot. We don't live in town so I'm not really in the media circle. If I was single and living in London - oh my word."

Virgin's PR comes to collect O'Connell. "I promise I didn't say Dr Fox [Magic's breakfast presenter] has a fat arse," he says and grins.