When Anthea Turner was born, her father spread the afterbirth on his rose bushes. When she was divorced nearly four decades later, her father had to stand by the rose bushes and repel the tabloid hounds.

Live by the media, die by the media. It's a maxim Anthea Turner is more familiar with than most people. Famous for being famous, Anthea has gone from girl-next-door goddess to fallen star, due to her much-publicised affair (while married to Peter Powell) with Grant Bovey, who was also married. Grant left his wife, Della, and three young children for Anthea, then returned to his wife and children and had the reunion photographed in OK magazine. Then he left them again.

Inevitably, the eventual Turner/Bovey wedding was also the subject of a picture deal with OK (advised by Anthea's forgiving former husband Peter Powell, who continues to be her manager). At the wedding, a large box of chocolate bars mysteriously appeared and Anthea and Grant were photographed eating them.

"Stomach Turner," declared the Mirror. Even publicist Max Clifford, no stranger to scandal, saw the photos as "sinking to new lows of tackiness".

Anthea insists that OK printed the chocolate bar photographs as the official wedding picture without the couple's permission and that bride and groom received no recompense from the chocolate manufacturer.

OK subsequently accompanied the couple on their honeymoon, nevertheless, and Anthea allowed the pictures to be used despite the chocolate bar betrayal because, she now says, "a deal is a deal".

"I'd been duped into being complicit in my own downfall and I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid as to walk into this one. I'd been so naive, even after 16 years in the business dodging the bullets [that] I never saw it coming."

How can anybody be that naive? Anthea, who started her acting career as a cherub in a school play and progressed to presenter on AA Roadwatch before becoming a TV celebrity, has since become the bete noire of the tabloids, criticised and ridiculed for splashing her life across the press. She hates it and insists she is congenitally incapable of developing a thick skin.

"I don't know how those people can go home and sleep at night," she says of those who poke fun at her.

But . . . what about those pictures for which Anthea coyly smiled? And what about the new celebrity autobiography, a book so revealing that Anthea can surely have no secrets left? Naive? Or just claiming to be?

Feeling the cold while in Dublin on Monday for interviews, a skinny, fragile, tense but nonetheless beautiful 40-year-old Anthea Turner justified her exhibitionism by saying that if the tabloids and magazines were going to make money out of her, then why shouldn't she? The wedding pictures would have appeared whether she had been paid or not, she reasoned.

As for the ironically-titled autobiography, Fools Rush In, Anthea sees it as her opportunity to set the record straight after all the lies which have been told about her.

The comments of the media on the perky, blonde have at times been extraordinarily cruel. Anthea was described by Lynda Lee Potter of the Daily Mail as "a bulging-eyed, grinning pixie in a semi-waking nightmare" in a review of GMTV.

Another writer said that Anthea leaving Blue Peter for GMTV was "a rare example of a presenter leaving a children's show and going intellectually downmarket".

Likening the complexities of TV presenting to "studying a knitting pattern", Anthea says Blue Peter was the highlight of her TV career. "I once had to make a chocolate tortoise cake with Mars bars for its feet and face and Smarties for its shell, but I wasn't allowed to mention the name of either product, so I ended by getting my tongue twisted around sentences like: `You take your little coloured choolate swers and your cholate-covered toffee bar.'

"There can never be a hiatus on the screen, so while you're juggling with terminology and working upside down, you're also trying to keep the whole thing flowing. It was the most challenging work I'd done in my life."

Another challenge was wriggling out of an on-air blooper which had the tabloids squealing with delightful indignation. A female co-presenter was sitting between a male co-presenter's legs when Anthea commented (thinking she was off-air): "That's a nice place to be, Bonnie."

Whatever about her career (which also included a stint on the travel programme Wish You Were Here), once Anthea's personal life became daily tabloid fodder, she began to feel totally divorced from her public image.

"It was like reading about someone else," she says. Her roller-coaster relationship with the media, which alternates between love and hate, has made her identify with another blonde goddess. "Sometimes I think my life is like Princess Diana's in microcosm."

The duality of celebrity, whereby one simultaneously benefits from fame while being punished by it, is a phenomenon of global culture at the turn of the century. The instant nature of the media, which compresses information into daily and even hourly soundbytes, gives the impression that celebrities are actors in real-life soap operas, where all behaviour is judged in black-and-white terms.

Anthea and her former husband and current manager Peter Powell thought they had this sussed when, on the day that Della Bovey found out about her husband Grant's infidelity, Peter decided to be proactive and issued a press release in which Peter, Anthea and Grant were all quoted. It came across as boasting, although to this day Anthea insists she will never be comfortable with the fact that she committed "adultery", a word she says with such shame that her voice nearly becomes a whisper.

How can this be the same person? The brazen media hussy flaunting her affair with somebody else's husband and the woman who sits on a suite in the Shelbourne Hotel, seemingly embarrassed at her "adultery"?

Okay (or should I say, OK), nobody's perfect. On the other hand, Anthea burst out of her seemingly perfect marriage to Peter in the most public way possible. Doesn't she see her own contribution to the uncomfortable media spotlight she finds herself in?

No, is the answer. She says she had no idea what was at stake when she embarked on a TV career - which seems to have landed in Anthea's lap after several rough years when she lived in an abusive and exploitative relationship with a Radio DJ Bruno Brookes, whom she left for Powell.

"I wanted nothing more than to be Mrs Peter Powell," writes Anthea. But while the marriage didn't work out, as a career move it couldn't be beat, since Powell went on to engineer his wife's successful TV career.

Yet Anthea insists that her career was never orchestrated and the book gives the impression that life, love, men and media mayhem just happened to Anthea without any prior planning on her part. Women, she says, are punished for being "ambitious" while men are not.

This victim attitude is either disingenuous or - as Anthea claims - naive since in reality it cannot be the case. Was Anthea naive? Or simply in denial that she couldn't have it both ways? using her sweet-as-pie image to get work while being anything but off camera?

Anthea, such a goody-two-shoes throughout the 1990s that she had a sweetpea named after her, seems to suffer from the classic syndrome of the celebrity who blatantly courts the media yet simultaneously resents its attentions. It's a gambler's game played by people like Anthea, people like Posh and Becks, people like Madonna, who thrive on their ability to manipulate their image, then when it goes wrong - pick up their toys and go home.

Anthea, to be fair to her, seems to accept that fame is a double-edged sword. She seems convinced that by putting her side of the story, she will win in the end. Currently without a media job as presenter or anything else (unless you call celebrity a full-time job), she would like to be taken seriously as a mature woman presenter/interviewer and identifies with role models such as Esther Rantzen, and also Gloria Hunniford who has provided tea and sympathy throughout Anthea's career.

Whether she'll last the pace long enough to be rehabilitated as a respected presenter is another day's work entirely. But with her ex-husband (who has never entered another relationship) managing her career and the media as mercurial as ever, she may be reborn. If so, the afterbirth will come in the form of shredded tabloid headlines.

Fools Rush In by Anthea Turner is published by Little, Brown, price £16.99 in UK