Captain Moonlight: Sneer, there, everywhere

YOU know Muriel Gray. She's the thin, mean Scots one with the spiky hair and opinions. Acerbic, that's the word, with one of those Glaswegian voices designed for the sneering end of irony, especially when there are smug English metropolitans to be swatted. Started on The Tube, the first of the yoof programmes, went on to The Media Show, minority channel type.

And then there was the hoax arts series featuring the olfactory installation artist specialising in dead sheep which completely hoodwinked the said smugs. And now she's got this new series, starting next week, Channel 4, on cars. So this metropolitan, well-wrapped, travelled far north to offices near Sauchiehall Street for a tongue lashing about the evils of the automobile.

Cut. Got it wrong again. Muriel giggles, and is charmingly, well, daffy. And likes cars: 'I do recognise that the car is the greatest threat to the planet in our lifetime . . . having said that, I'm not giving up my bloody car. Apart from anything else, more so than the contraceptive pill, the car is the single most liberating force of this century.

'Besides, I absolutely love big, fast, fuck-off cars. I'm sorry, but I do. I can't help it. They're such good fun. And until they make the private car illegal and introduce a fully integrated and successful public transport system, I'm not giving it up. Why should I?'

Muriel moves on to the thrill of the Ferrari Spider 348, the Dodge Viper, and even the Porsche 911 - the 'outstanding symbol of Thatcherism with slight Nazi overtones' - to which she has now become converted. But she wants to stress she is no 'petrol head', that she is willing to consider alternative, cleaner power for the car.

Gallus Besom, her production company, has made the series, Carnography. Her offices are newly converted, rather swanky in a primary-colour way. They are making ads now. There are other projects that cannot yet be talked about, but will probably involve a change of company name, which would be a good thing, because she is fed up with the popular, but inaccurate, translation of Gallus Besom from the Glaswegian 'cheeky wee bitch' (she prefers something more on the lines of 'feisty woman'). She has married and has a young son. This autumn her wannabe blockbuster first novel will come out. That old mellowing question is unavoidable.

She is not denying it. She has given up, she says, getting so 'incredibly angry'. Not that there aren't digs at The Late Show; self-congratulating untalented mediocrities in television; advertising people who say they are the only ones who can make ads when she can turn them out in the lunch hour; people who can't grasp that Noel's House Party is a great show and The Piano is a bad film; people who can't see the difference between Middlemarch and a 'Merchant Ivory piece of crap like Room With a View'. The trouble with democracy, she says, is that the majority of people are 'so bloody stupid'.

Given all this, it's not surprising that she gets a fair amount of returning fire. Nor that she should have driven the Sunday Telegraph to a wheezing profile which accused her, inter alia, of being an arriviste who was not quite working-class Glaswegian enough (only one parent qualifying). A politically correct Su Pollard, it concluded. Muriel doesn't want people to like her, a unique lack of ambition in her chosen field. 'I always say I'm a drawback presenting any programme . . . I have an unpleasant screen personality.' How does she know? 'I get hate mail.' What does it say? 'Piss off and die. I do concentrate on trying to be more Judith Chalmers, but then the elastic snaps and half-way through the link I sneer.'

Currently the media world awaits The Trickster, her 175,000-word horror story, for which she has been given pounds 80,000 in advance and another pounds 20,000 in film rights. She has 69,000 words to go. 'We're not talking Turgenev. It's written in American and set in Canada. I want them to buy it.' Why? 'Have a little guess.' Money? 'R-i-g-h-t. I would like to make lots of money for once in my life.' And then she would like it to mark her start in feature film making, in co-operation with Hollywood, which is already interested. This will not make her popular either, she fancies.

There was a time, though, a couple of years ago, she says, when people saw her enthusiastic series about climbing the Munros in the Scottish Highlands and decided she was 'not such a bitter old cow after all, she's just a bonny wee lass who likes to climb mountains'. It was, she says, horrible.

(Photograph omitted)