'It's about bloody time for culture'

"I think what they're trying to do is really brave. I'm not a spokesman for The Culture Show - I'm just one of five presenters, which is very nice by me as a new mum - but I think it's a really challenging project. There's always been a problem, in my experience, with arts programmes that condescend-to, or patronise, the audience. My theory is that you should stop worrying about who's watching and what the demographic is, and just make a great programme. I think that's what they're trying to do with The Culture Show."

Frostrup does acknowledge, though, that the BBC's impending charter renewal may have influenced the corporation's decision to schedule some serious-ish arts programming at prime time. "You don't have to be a cynic to wonder whether the two are connected," she says.

In fact, for the first time in her life, Frostrup would be "totally happy to be doing a lot less". Having Molly has inevitably re-ordered her priorities - though she is not falling for any old guilt trip, either. "I really don't feel guilty about going back to work. I go to work: that's what I do, and that's what Molly will do. I really don't feel that I'm doing her untold harm by being a working mother."

FROSTRUP has never seemed the insipid Bridget Jones type, and is in no danger of reversing her opinions on the pleasures of the single life ("It was great fun, all that free drink at all those parties, it was marvellous") but even she admits to hearing the muffled ticking of a biological clock. "I'd have had to be a nutcase not to be aware that it was ticking," she says. "But I always thought that I would [have a baby]. I never worried about it because I always assumed it would happen."

Finding the right bloke was the problem, however. Like most women of her generation and the one below, her views on modern family life are shaped by practical concerns and by basic feminist tenets, now so common as to be hardly feminist at all. "I get so angry when people turn around and say of a childless woman in her late thirties or early forties, 'Oh, she chose having a career over having children and it serves her right that she can't have them now.'

"Most women work hard to find a partner to settle down with, but they're not going to compromise. Most of us want at least the vague possibility that a relationship is going to last in order to give stability to our children. And women do have to work nowadays, it's not like they can sit at home and wait for some man to marry them. That's not a choice.

"So, you go out to work and then suddenly you wind up at 38 and you think, 'Oh, God, have I left it too late?' And some women, a lot less fortunate than me, go to see a doctor at that point and are told that they have. I think that must be the most devastating thing you can find out. And the point is that most women in that position haven't made some conscious decision to pursue a career and have children some time in the future. It's just happened that way by default." Frostrup had to go halfway around the world to find her future husband. "I went out with a number of great men in my twenties and thirties and I don't regret any of those relationships, but when I met Jason I felt very very strongly - and, who knows, the future may prove me wrong - that this was a man I could trust and rely on." They met in 2001 on a charity trek through the Himalayas. Frostrup was with her good friend Penny Smith, and at first was merely irritated by McCue's late-night drinking around the camp fire with his mates. Back in London on a date, though, he suddenly seemed a lot more attractive.

"I have no idea why," she says. "Maybe it was the light, or just one of those strange tricks of fate. I didn't actually think about having children with him immediately because I thought he was a bit too irresponsible. But he was very very lovely to me, and that counted for a lot at that time." They were married last year on, of all the bizarre places, a Second World War troop carrier in the middle of the Pacific.

AT THE time of the wedding, few gossip columnists could resist alluding to Frostrup's very public is-she-orisn'tshe "affair" with George Clooney. Frostrup herself has done a great deal to foster the notion of a grand flirtation with Clooney, writing long, teasing pieces about him for newspapers - though she will only confirm their very good friendship. " Actually, I'm slightly jealous of his and Jason's relationship now. He used to call me when he was getting in touch with us, but now he seems to call Jason instead."

Indeed, Clooney seems the perfect friend. "He was one of the few people who could handle the prospect of a newly born Molly." When Molly was only two weeks old, he invited Mariella and Jason to relax for the weekend at his house in Italy, where a cook catered to their every need. "I was so embarrassed every time she cried," says Frostrup somewhat oddly, "but he would just laugh."

Weekends with George are apt to be glamorous affairs. At eight months pregnant, Frostrup and McCue took a muchpublicised holiday, again in Italy, with Clooney, his girlfriend Lisa Snowdon, Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. "But I was huge!" laughs Frostrup. "The only thing I had to wear that wasn't revolting was this halter-neck dress from Topshop with sunflowers all over it. Everyone kept asking me where I got it from, even Jennifer Aniston."

Gina Bellman chips in to tell me how completely unprepared Frostrup was for Molly's arrival. Despite her self-confessed bossiness in those newspaper agony aunt columns, Frostrup gives every impression of being rather scatty herself. "Two weeks before Molly was due, she didn't have anything. She hadn't even got a bag packed for the hospital."

"It's true," admits Frostrup. "Well, I had a cot and a car seat, but none of those other little things it turns out you actually really need."

She turns to Bellman and looks her up and down. "I still can't believe you're wearing the same dress!"

"If anyone asks," whispers Bellman, "let's just say we're doing it for charity."

Dear Mariella - An Indispensable Guide to 21st Century Living by Mariella Frostrup (Bloomsbury, £9.99). The Culture Show is on Thursdays at 7pm/11.20pm on BBC2.