Fi Glover: The rise of velvet voice

It is almost impossible to print anything that the Radio 5 Live presenter Fi Glover says. That's not because of any tendency to use expletives. Indeed, thanks to a girls'-school education and a mother who disapproves of swearing, Glover's vocabulary is peppered with delightfully arcane expressions such as "poppycock". No, the problem lies in her unrelenting habit of self-deprecation and ironic wit. In print, she could be seriously misunderstood.

Hearing her on the radio is quite different. There, she makes perfect sense, requiring no explanation, as long as you have a sense of humour. She recently stopped presenting the late-night Fi Glover Show, which she describes as "the closest thing to student radio that I think anybody should be allowed to get in their mid-thirties. It has sometimes descended into terrible fits of giggles, but I've no regrets. I've never apologised for giggling – it's high-quality public-service giggling."

Typical of that was the occasion when she inserted mischievous adjectives into the classified football results, reading out: "Stalybridge Celtic, a whopping 4; Morecambe, quite a luscious 3." She blushes to be reminded of it, putting it in the class of things that seemed funny at the time, just like when she and her friends blacked out their teeth for the school photo.

Yet, after 18 months of presenting the late show to acclaim, Glover decided to move on, believing that the balance between work and the rest of life was too important for her to spend night every night in a radio studio, however great the job.

Bob Shennan, controller of 5 Live and a Fi fan, understood her reasons but was loath to lose her. When the opportunity arose for a reshuffle, he made her an offer she was unable to refuse. So, from next Monday, Glover replaces Nicky Campbell as the host of the 9am-to-noon phone-in as Campbell moves on to co-present the breakfast show. The negotiations took "about two and a half minutes", she says.

She does not think she will have to adapt her somewhat irreverent tone for the new slot. "Bob knows what he's booked," she says. But the show will be more heavy-hitting than a reflective late-night programme. There will be more breaking news, of course. And she will have big-name guests, of the sort that do not appear late at night. Estelle Morris on why she quit as Education Secretary; Helen Fielding previewing her next book; and David Beckham on family and fame are high on her wish list.

Fame is of personal interest because the one aspect of her new job that alarms her is the potential cost to her privacy. "A friend of mine said, 'You're going to be fabulously famous', and the very core of my being went wobbly. That's the bit I'm daunted by."

She has already suffered a brush with tabloid intrusion when she separated from her husband and he took up with her fellow 5 Live presenter Victoria Derbyshire. Although she does not refer to that slice of unwanted publicity, it is clear that one of the things she loves about radio is the comparative anonymity. "Once you lose your anonymity, it's the one thing you can't get back," she says.

She did spend three years on television, though, as a presenter on BBC2's now-defunct Travel Show, and she is too clever to rule out a return on screen. "It would be foolish at 33 to say I'm never going to do this or that, but I am very, very happy on radio. It ticks all my boxes," she says. "I find TV a scary old world. It's a fallacy that if you're good at radio you're good at television. It's not an assumption I would make about myself at all."

Although she is now well on her way to being a household name, Glover did not at first intend to go into broadcasting. As a child, she played the flute, piano and oboe and thought she would be a classical musician. But she decided she had neither the talent nor the dedication and discovered the temptations of boys and smoking; when her best friend announced she wanted to be a journalist, she decided that was what she would do, too. "I thought it sounded very glamorous," she laughs.

But it was a while before the idea got off the ground. She did a little journalism at the University of Kent, where, on the strength of one A-level, she studied classics and philosophy. Odd jobs followed, before she eventually won a place on the BBC's trainee reporters scheme.

"I was extraordinarily fortunate. A lot of the elimination process was done on your voice, and that's the luck of the draw," she says. Her voice is invariably described as "velvet".

So her career began in local radio in Northampton, Humberside and Somerset and continued with the breakfast show on GLR, in London; then she got her Travel Show break. "They were looking for someone who wasn't tall, blonde and glamorous, because Juliet Morris was the other presenter. I was short, dark and a bit gobby," she says.

Next on the CV came 5 Live's Sunday Service, the sparky political show, on which she refereed contests between the acerbic journalist Andrew Pierce and Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown's former spin doctor. It quickly became a hit. "It was quite piss- take-y, but when we wanted to talk about something serious, which most politics is, we talked about it quite seriously without apologising for doing so."

Although Glover moved on, and Sunday Service is about to be dropped, it has been one of the programmes much praised in the BBC's review of political coverage. Though some have been critical of that review, Glover is in favour. "The BBC is a public-service organisation and it blooming well should be trying to serve the serious side of society as well as doing entertainment and that kind of stuff," she says. But she is not sure that television and radio can reinvent politics to capture people's imagination: "It's a terribly difficult thing to do."

Glover was in the frame to present one of the suggested new political programmes with Rod Liddle, formerly editor of Radio4's Today. But as soon as she was offered the Nicky Campbell show, she decided it was too big a job to take on the politics series, too. Similarly, after the successful publication of a book, Travels with My Radio, last year, another was planned. While others might have been tempted to capitalise on their success, that, too, is on hold while she gets to grips with her new challenge. She has no desire to overload herself.

It seems that when Glover says she is not ambitious, she means it. "I've got quite a big thing about balance of the professional and personal, and I think that means you're probably not ever going to be enormously successful." When she is not working, she says, she is an avid cook and a real home bird. "Home is my castle," she says. "Sometimes I spend quite a lot of time rearranging furniture."