INTERVIEW: Mariella Frostrup credits her love of reading with her Irish upbringing, but the presenter is nervous about coming back for the Dublin Writers' Festival. She tells TARA BRADYabout working in Africa, her diverse CV and why she is glad she waited until her 40s to have children

IT’S A BRIGHT May morning in Notting Hill and a quick scout around the private members’ club at the Electric Cinema indicates that the season has arrived when 30-something women wear their hair extensions long and pushed back by sunglasses. The hip hideout thrills to the sound of media meetings. A pregnant Claudia Winkleman sits in the corner; women armed with multi-national branded folders and iPods order green teas and mochas.

It’s an awfully fashionable place to be badmouthing fashion. But Mariella Frostrup is more than game. “Maybe it’s an age thing,” sighs the 48-year-old. “But I’ve lost all interest in fashion. I was never particularly on-trend. I would be the person wearing flares a year late. But the idea that we’re still obsessed with thousand-pound handbags? Ridiculous. The idea that we should change our entire wardrobe three or four times a year as designers dictate is a travesty. An awful lot of those companies that are selling crap to women all over the world really ought to be reinvesting in women. If they’re going to keep us enslaved to this unnecessary consumerism, then fine. Give something back.”

She nods at the waiter as her coffee arrives. This is Frostrup’s local. Her loyalty to the postcode and indeed the cinema, pre-dates the suburb’s gentrification. Later, as we stroll along the Portobello Road markets, her residual Irish brogue more pronounced from our encounter, she outlines a quick socio-geographical primer.

“I started out in a squat just down by Latimer Road. I came over with my friend Mairead from Kilkenny and we moved in through a friend of her friend’s. We didn’t know anyone. It was one of these places that was just full of the Irish.”

She has subsequently graduated to a mansion block near Bayswater, and a lifestyle she freely concedes is “enviable”. The successful television presenter and arts journalist enjoys the stability of big house married life; it’s a consoling counterpoint to a childhood she describes as “fractured”.

“I like feeling safe,” she says. “I’m really nervous about living in places with bars on the windows. I like having ground space for the kids. I like being fully in the city when we’re here; we tend to bugger off at weekends any way.”

For Frostrup, “buggering off at weekends” can mean a great many things. She and her family have recently returned from India, where a deal with the kids backfired: “I said they could play video games while we were travelling. Which was fine until we were travelling five hours a day. That music! It kills me.”

There are annual jaunts to old pal George Clooney’s villa at Lake Garda. (Clooney is reputedly too much of a bachelor to appreciate the company of children, but he will make exceptions for the Brangelina mob and Frostrup’s much smaller brood.) There was that weekend away in Oslo where Frostrup got in touch with her Scandinavian roots by “eating pickled herring like a madwoman. My husband said I was a stranger to him.”

A veteran globetrotter and campaigner for the developing world, Frostrup’s recent destinations also include Mozambique and Liberia. Last year she founded the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust, a foundation to support grass roots equality projects in Africa.

“I’ve always had a relationship with Africa,” she says. “My father was friends with president [Julius] Nyerere of Tanzania; an old boyfriend of mine lived in Kenya; I would have travelled for various things like Comic Relief and Oxfam over the years. It’s a tiny thing. Foundation makes it sound very grand. I was just sick of the entirely negative view we have of Africa. It’s all very well supporting better childbirth conditions and vaccination programmes and HIV drugs. But ultimately you have to change the entire culture. Step into the developing world and you find places where there are no laws against rape, where women don’t have the right to inherit land that they’ve worked for 40 years, where women are prevented from entering polling stations. You have to make women part of those cultures in a meaningful, sustainable way.”

Her involvement with feminist causes outside her native hemisphere does not, she insists, indicate that there are no more lands to conquer on the home front. “The fact that pornography is now more acceptable than it was when I was a teenager is an enormous step back,” she says. “Who thought we’d still be looking at page-three girls in 2011? We have a lot to learn from the new feminisms of the developing world. Their interests aren’t in burning their bras and having sex with as many partners as possible. Their ethos is based on women’s involvement in society and politics. In Rwanda 54 per cent of parliament is made up of women. It’s 19 per cent in the UK. In Liberia you have Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female African leader. And instead of doing what Margaret Thatcher did – which was get in and do absolutely nothing for women other than carry a handbag – her government is rebuilding market centres and putting schools in the top floor so that the kids who used to crawl around women’s feet all day are now going to school.”

Graceful, glowing and so charming she can bring on a blush, Frostrup’s most forthright views never sound strident. How could they? Her husky tones, a regular top contender in throwaway sexiest voice polls, are musically incapable of it. Even she’s bemused by the independent reputation enjoyed by her vocal chords.

"Growing up in Ireland nobody ever said a word about my voice one way or the other," she laughs. "The first I knew about it was when I started doing the music show Big Worldfor Channel 4. All these reviews came out saying 'smouldering husky voice' and 'glacially pretty'. I thought it was a joke. I didn't know who this person was. It was like there was a stranger out there calling herself Mariella Frostrup. Even now that's how I regard the public me. It's like an avatar out there doing work but it's not really attached to the rest of me. That works very well."

Born in Norway and raised in Kilmacanogue, Co Wicklow, Frostrup left Ireland for London in 1977. She was only 16, but as the eldest of six siblings from a fractured family, she felt she was ready. "I had no other option," she recalls. "My dad had died when I was 15 and I felt quite hemmed in after that. I hadn't lived with my mother for quite a while because my stepfather was a nightmare. I couldn't really stay at school, living on my own. And there weren't many opportunities in Dublin. I'd always wanted to see what the wider world felt like. I remember my father was offered a job at the Sunday Timesand he hadn't taken it. He'd stayed at The Irish Times. So I always wondered what would have happened if we had gone to London. Maybe he wouldn't have drank so much. Maybe he wouldn't have died so young. For all those reasons I had a residual curiosity about London and a desire to step away."

She’s not bitter about her parents’ separation though she admits the domestic situation was a mess: “I think a lot of people who were children or young teenagers in the 1970s struggled with parents who were at times more immature than they were. It was a very particular period, I think, in terms of the social revolution. Everyone seemed to be having affairs or splitting up. It’s extraordinary to think about it now that there’s so much emphasis on children’s welfare and stability. But adults felt they were entitled to their fun. It made me in a way. My parents split up when I was young. My father drank too much. I had five young brothers and sisters. So all of these things conspired to make me quite precocious.”

In London she soon found work as an assistant engineer for the Rolling Stones. (She remains friendly with erstwhile boss Mick Jagger to this day.) By 19 she had amassed enough industry contacts to land a glamorous job at Parlophone Records. Her looks helped, she admits.

“Not looking like the back of a bus does open doors,” she says. “But turning that to your advantage is a different matter. I can think of meetings or lunches when people would arrange to meet me but they never had any interest in a professional sense. They just wanted to have drinks. I wasted a lot of time on dates that I, in my naivety, did not know were dates. I would be standing there with paper and pen and would head home wondering what they thought of my ideas.”

Determined to be taken seriously, she forged a path as a TV film critic on Video Viewand The Little Picture Show. She continues to review movies for Harper's Bazaar but is less than enamoured by the state of contemporary cinema.

“It’s ridiculous that if you’re looking for a good film you had better be looking between October and January. That’s when the Oscars are, so that’s your lot. The idea that our entire viewing habits are determined by this one awards ceremony is crazy. And the idea that everything depends on opening weekend box office is insanity. If adolescents don’t turn up in their droves in the first two days, it’s off the screen. We live in a society that is getting steadily older and all our movies are made for teenagers.”

She'll always have books. The presenter of BBC Radio 4's Open Bookand The Book Showon Sky Arts is positively evangelical about literature, a condition she attributes to her Irish upbringing. "The family were very Irish in their love of books," she recalls. "My mum was brilliant with kid's books. We had Alan Garner and Narnia. With the meagre money she had, she kept us in books. My dad used to review from time to time at The Irish Times. The most wonderful luxury! A book would plop through the letterbox and it was the most exciting thing in the world. I always thought I'd love to do some sort of job where books would plop through my letterbox." She laughs. "Be careful what you wish for."

She's particularly excited, if a little panicked, about her upcoming appearances at the Dublin Writers' Festival and Hay-on-Wye. The Sky Arts Book Show Liveat the Dublin Writers' Festival will see Frostrup quizzing Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, John Boyne, Colm Tóibín, Rebecca Miller and Liz Lochhead onstage at the capital's Liberty Hall over two shows.

“I probably do have a Utopian view of Irish manners, having left there so long ago,” she says. “But I do feel it’s the place to discuss literature in front of an audience. In the UK, there is still a lingering idea that literature is for the privileged few and pulp fiction is for the great unwashed. I don’t think that degree of literary snobbery has ever been true of Ireland. Standards of education have made sure it isn’t the case. It’s fine for John Banville to write his thrillers and his Booker Prize-winning novels. They’re not afraid of the arts in Ireland.”

As she approaches her “old bird” years, Frostrup feels she is only clearing her throat. She says she enjoyed her time as a single woman, but has blossomed as a wife and mother. She met her husband Jason McCue, a human-rights lawyer, almost 10 years ago on a charity trek in Nepal. It was irritation at first sight.

“We have enjoyed the most adversarial relationship from the moment we met,” she laughs. “We’re lucky to have a healthy, bickering, very real relationship. I couldn’t have settled for someone who thought of me as a princess. I once had a doting boyfriend and I was allergic to him. He kept organising things for me. I just thought: ‘Have you not got enough stuff of your own to be getting on with?’ ”

The couple have since welcomed children Molly (six) and Danny (five). “I think if I was a bit younger I could have played more football with my son,” she says. “But I definitely think there are positive things about having lived a big chunk of your life before you have kids. I’ve never felt frustrated about not being able to do something on account of the children. I was single for a lot of my 20s and 30s. I was a fair-weather party goer and would always leave early but I enjoyed it. Now I get this entirely new life.”

MARIELLA FROSTRUP: CV

1962: Born in Oslo to a Norwegian journalist and a Scottish artist

1967: Moves to Co Wicklow; her father becomes foreign editor at The Irish Times

1978: Moves to London with £15 in her pocket following her father's death. Finds work as an assistant engineer with the Rolling Stones

1979: Lands a job with Parlophone Records; tours with Bananarama and Spandau Ballet; marries Richard Jobson of The Skids

1984: She and Jobson separate; the divorce papers are served on Frostrup's 21st birthday

1985: Organises the PR for Live Aid

1987: Presents music show Big World Caféon Channel 4

1989: Presents Video View

1993: Video Viewrebranded The Little Picture Show; the programme runs for three more years

1994: Appears on Have I Got News For You, and dismisses the show as a "sexist disgrace"

1998: Meets George Clooney in Cannes

2000: Appears on judging panel for the Booker prize; presents BBC's Panorama

2001: Meets lawyer Jason McCue, who represented the families of the 1998 Omagh bombing, while on a charity trek of Nepal.

2002: Sends herself up by appearing on the sitcom Coupling; pops up on Absolutely Fabulousin the same capacity during the following year

2003: Gives birth to daughter Molly after gynaecologist tells her she has a 0.000001 chance of conceiving

2005: Gives birth to son Danny; hosts Open Bookon BBC Radio 4; Dear Mariella . . ., a collection of her columns for the Observeris published

2007: Chairs a question-and- answer session with British prime minister Gordon Brown at the Labour Party Conference

2008: Receives an honorary doctorate from Nottingham Trent University for services to journalism; presents The Book Showon Sky Arts for the first time

2010: Creates the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust; tours Liberia with actress Renée Zellweger

Present: Writes for the Guardian, Observer, Mail on Sunday, Harper's Bazaarand the New Statesman; works as a broadcaster for the BBC and Sky

CASH FOR ARTS: SKY PROJECTS

Public funding for the arts might be light at the moment but a series of Sky Arts initiatives will help make up the difference. Pop along to the the Sky Arts Den at Filmbase, Temple Bar from May 21st-26th or visit sky.com/arts for further details on these funds.

Get Creative Fund:€1000 is available for attendees of the Dublin Writers' Festival to kick-start any long-unfulfilled dreams they might have about taking up ballet or the bassoon. The most inspiring entry gets the grant for an artistic course of their choice.

Futures Fund: This will provide bursaries of £30,000 (approximately €34,200) for five young people in the UK and Ireland to support the transition from school, college or university to becoming a working artist.

Ignition Series:This is to help six Irish or UK arts organisations to create new works of art. A cash investment of £200,000 (€228,000) will be awarded to each chosen project. Installations, performances, events and live exhibitions are all eligible.