Denise van Outen is talking me through the songs she's performing in Blondes, the musical memoir co-written with her friend, the comedian Jackie Clune, now showing at Edinburgh. A few Mae West and Marilyn Monroe numbers, from the films she used to watch with her nan. Dusty. Blondie. Britney. Dolly Parton, of course. Oh, and Bonnie Tyler's It's A Heartache. Van Outen is nuts about Bonnie Tyler. When she was eight, she broke her leg jumping up and down on her parents' bed, singing Bonnie Tyler into the curtain pull. Years later, on the night she split up with Jay Kay, she bumped into Tyler at the Brit awards, and they wound up belting out It's a Heartache in the toilets.
"Gags and jokes, and the soundtrack of my life. Alan Carr said I'll be knee-deep in gays," says Van Outen excitedly. It's a week before she goes to Edinburgh, and she's forking through a mozzarella salad in a Hampstead restaurant not far from her flat. She says she relates to all of these famous blondes: "In terms of being in this industry, being a blonde, and everything that comes with that." So, how blond is she, anyway? Ah. She's not really sure any more. She started helping things along at 14, when she bought her first bottle of Sun-In from Superdrug. "Nowadays, I have highlights. Which means if I left it . . . well, I don't really know. Let's draw a veil."
This is Van Outen's first time at the festival. In the past, she has always been tied into contracts, but this year, "because everything in TV land is relatively quiet", it was doable. The show – part cabaret, part standup – has been put together in five weeks; not bad when you consider she is a newlywed, having married Lee Mead (who won Any Dream Will Do, the BBC's search-for-a-Joseph show on which she adjudicated alongside Andrew Lloyd Webber) in the spring. She digs the script out of her gigantic silver bag and flicks through it: a tangle of highlighter and annotations and vicious cuts, very much a work-in-progress.
But Van Outen is a grafter. Her earliest ambition was to be a member of the Brian Rogers Dance Connection, the house dance troupe from the TV game show 3-2-1. She started modelling for knitting patterns at seven, paid her own way through the Sylvia Young stage school, and landed the Big Breakfast gig alongside Johnny Vaughan in her very early 20s. After The Big Breakfast, she got a bit lost (free drinks, best tables, flashing her knickers at the paps), and made some bad career choices, winding up in a late-night Channel 4 car-crash called Something for the Weekend. When that folded, she fired her agent ("I now realise that's not the answer, but anyway . . . "), and through her new one let it be known that she'd quite fancy this or that flagship BBC show. "I thought I was still in that place where I could choose whatever I wanted to do," she says, rolling her eyes. The BBC was not interested. Van Outen simply wasn't primetime. "And I was like, 'Oh.' Everything I'd grown up wanting to be and do was now not possible. I didn't want to be edgy or late-night: I wanted to be Cilla! I was a bit embarrassed. Upset and hurt. And I had no work. I've always worked, since I was a kid. It's all I've ever known."
When she was doing The Big Breakfast, the producers of Chicago had offered her the part of Roxie Hart, and she'd turned them down. Now she went back, cap in hand, "out of desperation". They were no longer interested, but she auditioned and nailed it. "That was the turning point for everything." It took her to Broadway and caught the eye of Lloyd Webber, who revived Tell Me On a Sunday around her. And eventually it led to a guest slot – as the seasoned old pro, a generous source of advice and tears; someone, incredibly, edging towards classiness – on Any Dream Will Do and I'll Do Anything. Finally, Van Outen was where she'd always wanted to be: dolled up to the nines, on the BBC, on a Saturday night.
Van Outen has no idea what's happening to these shows now; there are persistent rumours that Lloyd Webber may defect to ITV. If the show survives, she knows better than to assume she will be part of it. "You never know with Andrew. I just wait to get the call, rather than expect it."
Instead, she tries hard to make her own luck, engineer her own opportunities. She has set up a production company with the TV presenter Melanie Sykes, and they are currently touting an entertainment project around the networks (fingers crossed it's more inspired than their company name, Melden). In the meantime, it seemed like a good moment to get back on stage. "Theatre always comes first, emotionally. It's what I love; there's this need to do it. That's when I feel I've tapped into something. But really, without TV you don't get as much opportunity."
While she and Clune were assembling the script, she rang her old friend Clarke Peters – they met in 2001, doing Chicago on Broadway – to see if he'd like to direct; he said yes. Not having ever seen The Wire, in which Peters plays Lester Freamon(the detective who makes doll's house furniture on the side), Van Outen has some good stories about hanging out with him in cafes in London. Initially, she assumed everyone was staring at her.
"Denise is a classy bird," says Clune, a friend since Lloyd Webber drafted her in to update Tell Me On a Sunday. "She's always had this image of being fun, flirty, naughty. In reality, she is all of those things, but she is also very bright, a real woman's woman." Peters, you imagine, must feel as if he has been thrown to the lions. Clune says everyone was a bit nervous after the first readthrough of Blondes, "and Clarke gave a very intellectual and touching appraisal of the script. At the end he asked, 'Any questions?' There was a brief pause then I said, 'How big's your knob?' It could have gone either way, but someone had to break the ice. Denise cracked up laughing, and Clarke started to undo his flies. I knew we'd be OK."
"It's something to do with where I'm at," Van Outen says, explaining why she's putting her own life – personal anecdotes, family snaps – up on stage. "I've just got married. I'd like to start a family. It seems a nice time to reflect. Not long ago there were parts of my life I couldn't look back on, things that made me feel quite upset. Now I can talk about them, I feel they've shaped me. In a strange way, it's almost like closing the door." So she's rolling up her sleeves, preparing to talk not only about the sunny stuff, her nan's love of MGM musicals and her childhood in Basildon, but also about the experience of being the redtops' Poor Denise, a good-time girl who dated musicians, actors and a nightclub owner, and was systematically (and very conspicuously) unlucky in love. "I hated that tag of being the victim! It was horrible. For the first time I can be quite honest about it. Sometimes I think I didn't allow myself to feel the emotion of the breakups. You just put the makeup on, and the frock, and go out and do the job. I think I put too brave a face on it sometimes."
She mimes a "phew", glad those days are behind her. Marriages forged in the white heat of the TV studio aren't necessarily the safest of bets, but she and Mead do seem to be going about things fairly sensibly, having married quietly – no OK! magazine – in April. Babies loom large in her conversation, and every time she brings them up she touches the table, so open and hopeful that I find myself tapping it, too. They've recently bought a house in Kent and it's all very proper: Hunter wellies, copies of Country Life, tea sets that she picks up in charity shops for a fiver. They've even got a veg patch, though the rabbits keep shredding it. "But the quiet is quite scary," she says. "The first morning we woke up and we both went: my God, this is so quiet, something's wrong."
Mead has just returned from New York, where he was studying at the Lee Strasberg actors' institute. Never again, says Van Outen. "Even him being away for six weeks was hard. We'll have to have some policy changes, I think. It's too easy to grow apart. My parents have been married for 40 years, Lee's for 30 – we both know relationships have to be worked on." Her priorities are clear: the relationship comes first. It was the reason she walked away from the much-touted reunion with Johnny Vaughan on Capital FM's breakfast show a year ago; it's the reason she's not looking for any juicy contracts right now. "I don't want to commit to anything too long-term at the moment. We'd love to start a family. I'm 35. This side of my life has to take priority now – it's really, really important to me." And she raps the table again, just to make sure.