A lass act

Jayne Middlemiss has a confession to make: she has a mischievous predilection for making up outlandish quotes when doing interviews.
For example, Jayne told one magazine recently that she doesn’t have time for sex! And there was more. “I wander around naked all the time,” she revealed.
But Jayne is respectably attired when hot press drops by her hotel suite in Dublin. “As you can see now, I’m fully clothed. I don’t walk around naked,” giggles the former Top Of The Pops presenter.
What about that other comment? Does she seriously not have enough time for sex?
“I say stuff taking the piss. I find it amusing and then when it’s written down I suddenly don’t think it’s quite so funny. When you see something like that in black and white you just go: number one, it’s not even true; and number two, stop making a moron of yourself – trying to be amusing. That’s ridiculous, I know. But it doesn’t come across in print, so, I’ll stop trying to make jokes.”
The winner of the reality show Celebrity Love Island – Jayne won it alongside Irish contestant Fran Cosgrave – was in town to promote Eircom’s latest broadband packages. The 37-year-old, who is also the presenter of the engaging ITV show Orange Playlist, revealed that she is still slightly embarrassed by some episodes in Celebrity Love Island. The worst moment was when ex-Manchester United footballer Lee Sharpe publicly humiliated Jayne, live on TV, by rejecting her blatant sexual advances. Instead, he opted to snuggle up to Abi Titmuss. Furious at being ‘rejected’, Jayne was caught on camera spitting out insults: “Abi is a big, fat slag and I want to crunch her face in.”
Ouch!
“You see embarrassing things in your behaviour when you do a reality show,” she concedes. “There’s no barrier there – you’re just you. I looked a complete prick at times on the show. There are cringeworthy bits.
“That’s weird to even think about now – cos it’s like two-and-a-half years on. This was a person I knew for five weeks in my life. It’s like fancying the waiter when you’re 16, when you go to Corfu for the first time. It was broadcast, so people sort of remember that. But there are other bits I enjoyed.”
Jayne would like to set the record straight: she has never – despite her best efforts in chasing Lee Sharpe – dated a celebrity. The unreliability of Wikipedia is, once again, highlighted by Jayne’s page, which incorrectly states that she dated Goldie and Little Britain’s David Walliams. “I saw that as well and I thought it was really bizarre. I never went out with Goldie. I don’t know where that came from. I never went out with David Walliams either. If you ever have a chat with David in London and you are female, they’ll link you to him. I’m not the sort of girl who plays around. I’m sort of a one-man woman when I’m with somebody. For me it’s all about connections. I have a boyfriend. Just under a year (together),” she explains.
But while she has never gone out with anybody famous, Jayne unabashedly admits to craving the limelight from an early age. “My childhood was quite lonely – I wanted attention,” she reveals.
She started off her career by doing some so-called glamour modelling, including posing topless for The Sun newspaper when she was 19. Speaking about it now, Jayne appears to have some regrets about stripping down to her knickers. “It was an interesting choice, I admit. And sometimes I do now think, ‘Wow! That was weird. That was weird!’ You know? It was odd. I was 19. That was 18 years ago – I’m a very different person now. It was just a job I did. I was a model and someone paid me to do Page 3. It was never a question of sexuality for me. I never really considered it to be a sexual thing. Certainly the pictures are quite innocent looking for some reason – even though I haven’t got a top on.”
I felt like commenting that I’d never seen an “innocent looking” topless portrait in The Sun but decided to bite my tongue.
Best known for hosting some of the most influential music programmes on British TV and radio – including Top of The Pops and its spin off radio show on BBC Radio One, The Smash Hits Awards and The O-Zone – Jayne believes that the advent of modern technology has contributed to the dearth of shows of that ilk nowadays.
“Music TV doesn’t get commissioned. If people want to watch music on television these days, they’ll put the music channels on. People won’t commission the show I’d love to do, which would be a The Tube-style show, with live bands and interviews. I don’t know if that would ever be possible these days. The industry has changed,” she says.
“Even Top Of The Pops is gone, which was a national institution. It was one of the biggest brands in the world on the TV music side of things. It was such a sad thing that it disappeared. It was the one thing for new and up-and-coming bands. That was the thing – ‘I want to be on Top Of The Pops’. It united every sort of genre of music. I remember loads of things – like Madonna being there and me presenting, standing in front of Madonna. She is standing literally behind me, just about to perform, and me just thinking, ‘Please don’t mess this up! Oh, don’t fuck up! This is Madonna’. Just like being really scared. Then there was interviewing J-Lo. Loads of things. It was such a hubbub of everyone in one place at once. It was an amazing time.”
It might not have been her most high profile gig, but Jayne still retains a special affection for The O-Zone on BBC. She recalls: “That was my first ever job in TV. That was me and Jamie. We did it for five years. It was our little show and it was made on a really small budget. We hit it really lucky because we started doing it in ’95, so it was right in the middle of Britpop, Blur versus Oasis and all of that. So, we hit it at a good time. It felt like, ‘Wow. It is going to change the world here, this British music’. It really felt like we were in the middle of something incredible and, of course, nothing happened. Everyone just grew up!”