Fiona Bruce: Most wanted, very collectable

For a few moments, the main drag of leafy Hampstead village in north London is transformed into Wisteria Lane, the picket-fenced home to that fictional clutch of desperate housewives. Striding down the high street is a dead ringer for Bree Van de Kamp, she of the auburn hair, needlepoint-perfect presentation and home-baking skills to make Martha Stewart jealous.

Her double has the same coiffed auburn hair and is wearing a pair of towering patent heels, despite the fact she has cycled here. The sharp black accessories all Chanel, from her sunglasses through to her handbag and wristwatch are a perfect match for Bree's muted, pristine style, but the similarities end here.

The woman in question is the BBC's Fiona Bruce. One suspects she is far too high-minded to indulge in any of the petty gossip which is the desperate housewives' stock in trade. Yet, despite the austere front she presents reading the Ten O'Clock News in school ma'amish jackets, and her eight years delivering the grim details of violent crimes via Crimewatch, Bruce admits to trashy television tastes. Indeed, she cites Desperate Housewives as one of the first things on her Sky Plus.

If the new Antiques Roadshow promo is anything to go by, Bruce, as the show's new presenter, is now ready to reveal her lighter side on screen. "So much of what I have done is about death and destruction and famine and war," she says.

Bruce left Crimewatch last year when she was signed up to replace the Antiques Roadshow presenter Michael Aspel, who is retiring at 74. For the promo, broadcast for the launch of the BBC's new HD channel, Bruce was given her own stunt co-ordinator. She drives a car through a wall in pursuit of a wayward priceless vase, diving clear to catch the 2m antique just as the vehicle bursts into flames. Bruce tops her turn off with a relaxed flick of the hair, as if dare devil stunts are all in a day's work when you're at the helm of one of Britain's best-loved, if decidedly staid, Sunday evening institutions. Whether she will succeed in "sexing up" the show's image, as her appointment suggests it is hoped she might, will become clear when the first episodes air this autumn.

"If Antiques Roadshow hadn't come up I would have stayed at Crimewatch," she says, dispelling rumours the 44-year-old and her co-presenter Nick Ross, 60, were edged out to make way for Kirsty Young just five years Bruce's junior and a younger audience. "If they had hired some 20-year-old floozy I might have thought, 'Ah, that's why they wanted me to do Antiques Roadshow...' It was my choice to go and I didn't get any great sense of machinations behind the scenes. It's quite a lot to pull off: getting Michael Aspel to retire, Fiona to go to Antiques Roadshow, and some 20-year-old in to do Crimewatch." She will admit that the fact Ross, now "a very dear friend", was leaving did ease her decision. It will also give her the chance to reach out past a current affairs audience, record twice as many shows and win almost twice the audience of Crimewatch. "From a television perspective it was too good to turn down," she says.

Bruce has collated, and carefully pruned, her wealth of knowledge about keeping safe and avoiding crime into an upcoming book written with Crimewatch's on-screen detective Jacqui Hames. Savvy! The modern girl's guide to doing it all without risking it all, is packed with common sense advice on how a girl can drink and date without putting herself at risk. It is exactly what you would expect from the news-reading Bruce, though one imagines the devil-may-care streak in her, which is dusted off once a year and dressed up in a gold catsuit or fishnets in aid of Children In Need, might leave this sort of book on the shelf and order another round of drinks.

This type of big sister advice manual is not widely available in book form and Bruce is not quite sure how it will be marketed. It certainly isn't one of those pink-covered guides to making a stellar career and perfect family. "I'm interested in more practical things, a book which tells you how, if you're buying your first home, to make it safe. The other thing I feel strongly about is that I have made some of these mistakes, and probably will again. I wish I'd had a clearer idea about what to do about some of them."

Her London state school roots showed themselves at Oxford University, where she says she was "chippy" and involved herself in Reclaim the Night marches and singing with student new romantic bands anything to avoid contact with all those posh people. But though she was the first in her family to go to university, she is the daughter of a successful international businessman and her primary schooling was at an international institution in Italy, meaning that for a while she spoke English with a mid-Atlantic twang.

After graduating, she hauled herself through two career false starts, first in management consultancy and then in advertising where she met and later married Nigel Sharrocks, now managing director of Aegis Group. "My three or four years in advertising were great fun. I drank like a fish and everybody seemed to be shagging everyone else in the office. It was all highly amusing, but I've got a Calvinist work ethic. That's not to say people in advertising don't work hard, but it just didn't seem serious enough for me."

Finally, in 1989, she begged herself a researcher post on Panorama. Her first New Year's Eve working on that programme was spent chasing green goddesses to accident scenes, to see if the ambulance strike would lead to unnecessary fatalities. "I really felt like I was on a mission," she remembers. "From the word go I thought, 'This is what I want to do." She worked her way up, doing unpaid reporting shifts for breakfast news to see if she had the required talent. You can listen to her first report, a Grimethorpe Colliery story, online. "There must have been some kind of story there," she says. "It was worthy, that's for sure, but absolutely rubbish."

Her news-gathering skills were slightly more polished by the time she took off for Kurdistan, in search of Kurds willing to testify to abuse at the hands of Turkish military. "There were legion examples of it, but getting them to actually say it on camera when we were being followed everywhere by the Turkish was very difficult." Does she miss the exhilaration of chasing real stories, instead of just announcing them? "As far as I was concerned I was a reporter, and was very happy, before the presenting stuff came along. The great thing about working out of Newsnight or Panorama is that you can suggest things, and just go after a story. Then I had kids and that changed everything." Her long BBC career, just shy of two decades, means Bruce might consider herself sheltered from the sort of criticism regularly aimed at female newsreaders for hiding their lack of talent behind great hair and a pretty face. "I can only talk for myself," Bruce says, "but if reading an autocue were that easy I think more people would do it, and do it well.

"My job is to make it look easy and for you not to know that the autocue is not working and the camera has broken so I had to switch to another one with two seconds to go, that one of the headlines wasn't right and one of the lights in the studio popped, which is what happened just before I started the Ten O'Clock News two or three months ago. Hopefully nobody noticed."

Bruce fronts that bulletin on Fridays, has just started presenting "the Six" on the same day, and stands in for Huw Edwards and George Alagiah when necessary. Of her one-off documentaries, last year's evisceration of Cherie Blair, which aired as the Blairs vacated Downing Street, is notable, certainly for the subsequent press coverage criticising the wife of the former prime minister for courting the media she claimed to despise. "Cherie sent me a little note about it," says Bruce. "Thanking me for doing it. She didn't send me a note saying, 'I loved it', put it that way. Since, there has been a diplomatic silence, so one can only draw one's own conclusions from that."

Her contact with Cherie Blair's successor, Sarah Brown, is limited for the time being to their shared involvement with the charity Wellbeing of Women. "If she saw my documentary of Cherie, she'll probably think she should be careful of what she says. She's very together and clearly very clever. I always find myself blathering on like an idiot to her because she is quite the opposite. I'm sure she finds me hugely unimpressive," says Bruce.

Her involvement in charities which champion women's issues goes back years, and Fathers 4 Justice's Matt O'Connor used her support for Women's Aid to launch an attack on the line of questioning Bruce took during an episode of Real Story in 2004. O'Connor claimed Bruce's stance (an opposition to men convicted of domestic abuse winning custody rights) biased the interview. "He knew the terms of the interview and I gave him a bit of a going over. I make no apology for saying domestic violence was wrong. The question is, if a man has a history of domestic violence, should that be taken into account when discussing access to children. I fervently believe yes, and the law now says that it should. Does that always happen in courts? It doesn't."

The restraints of working within the BBC have not blunted any of the feistiness Bruce honed during her student days.

Her next documentary is a portrait of Bill Gates on his retirement from Microsoft, and she is still amused by her recent meeting with him in Seattle, where she encountered a man who schedules three-minute meetings and cannot clear his throat without a flunky running for a diet coke. She won't admit which other public figures she has set her sights on for an observational documentary, though she is investigating various possibilities. "They're hard gets," she says, betraying the calibre of her potential subjects. "To persuade someone to lay themselves open for an hour on national television is not easy."

When Bruce herself becomes the story, something journalists are supposed to shy away from but presenters cannot avoid, she is able to laugh at herself. She opened the Daily Mail one morning to find a picture of herself accompanied by the strapline "Why is Fiona Bruce so irritating?" Reading the piece, Bruce wasn't so much irritated as amused. "But if people questioned my journalism or ability, I would look at that very seriously."

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