why are they famous?: Denise Van Outen
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Your support makes all the difference.Main Claim: Wild child weathergirl made good. Mouthy little Miss Van Outen is now so popular as a laddish sex symbol of the Girl Power era that she has her own entertainment show, Snap!. Van Outen used to be a Big Breakfast bit player (the correlation between meteorology and peroxide well proven), but her Shazzer-style, starlet quality was embarrassingly manifest when compared with the plodding delivery and oooh-arrr yokel vowels of then anchor Sharron Davies. Van Outen now trades the usual round of blonde mouthy stuff of a morning and evening on Channel 4.
Appearance: Coronation Street bit of totty. Supermodel's shorter little sister.
Girl Power : Denise, 23, perfectly exemplifies the new breed of TV presenter - see Sara Cox, Rachel Williams and Zoe Ball. Blonde, ballsy, Loaded-style laddettes, happily posing a tits-out, ball-bashing conundrum, fluently treading that obligatory Nineties line between trendiness and porn, TV's twentysomethings have introduced a paradigm as rigid as frosted bobs and red jackets.
Past Form: Stage-brat Essex girl born in Basildon, daughter of a docker and a theatre worker, Van Outen attended the Sylvia Young Stage School (most luminous alumna: Baby Spice). Denise appeared in Les Mis at 11, followed by ads and kiddie shows.
Boy Trouble 1: Former boyfriend Paul Lamb, an Orpington phone sales rep, recently felt moved to tell the Sun about his love life with Denise: "She has a great sense of humour but wasn't the most exciting person in the world."
Boy Trouble 2: Lamb also revealed Denise's sizzling, top-secret affair with wrinkly rocker Gary Glitter, then 51. Denise, then 16, was in his 1991 comeback tour. "I always felt he had a look in his eye which said, 'I'm going to have your girlfriend...' He looked like a fat monster," says Paul. A peak at her diary told him the hard truth. "I took her virginity and was her first love and she did this to me." She now dates Dodgy's Andy Miller.
Fame Prospects: Snap!, according to Denise, is to be "fun, feisty and have a big personality - just like me." No problems in the confidence department, then. Expect fame for a couple of seasons, followed by catalogues, a minor pop star's baby, a red dye job and a couple of late-night spots Mariella Frostrup doesn't get.
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