In the week that I meet the television presenter Tess Daly, the media is thrown into a frenzy by the story involving three Pakistani cricketers allegedly accepting £150,000 in a match-fixing scandal. There have been so many scandals of late: MPs' expenses, tabloid phone hackery, the revelation that X Factor producers digitally enhance the singing voices of their favourite auditionees. So I feel it is only right that, in the interests of journalistic objectivity, I declare that I have been given a pot of Tess Daly Beauty Body Glow moisturiser. "It's a really lovely consistency," says Daly when, halfway through the interview, she hands over a bright pink cardboard box emblazoned with a photograph of her face. "Smells fab and gives your skin an amazing shimmer."
Just like her moisturiser, Daly herself is extremely shimmery in person: a glittering confection of glossy hair, highlighted cheekbones and golden-brown skin. When she arrives at the north London studio for her interview and photo-shoot, she is so clean and shiny it is as though she has been freshly dipped in varnish. Even her high-heeled shoes are a gleaming patent leather. "No, don't look at me!" she cries in mock horror. "I've been up since three. I look terrible."
She doesn't, of course. At 41, the Strictly Come Dancing presenter still looks at least a decade younger: endless legs, plumped-up lips and a slim physique. But what she does look, despite all that shimmer and sparkle, is unavoidably sad.
It is hard to pinpoint this sadness. It is not that she is uncommunicative – far from it. In fact, she talks so rapidly that when I eventually type up the quotes from the hour-long interview, it transpires she has said more than 7,000 words (which works out at an astonishing 116 per minute). Nor is she unsmiling – as a former model and someone trained in the arts of televisual light entertainment, Daly is accustomed to deploying a warm-hearted grin at precisely the right moment.
It is more that her smile never quite reaches her eyes, as if an invisible autocue is prompting her to do it, and there is an underlying weariness to her voice that only seems to dissipate when she is talking about her two daughters, six-year-old Phoebe and Amber, 15 months.
In fact, she informs me almost as soon as she sits down, Amber was up in the early hours and Daly has hardly slept. "So, yeah, slightly red-eyed today. I apologise for that." Perhaps the weariness is simply the exhaustion of a full-time mother – Daly and her husband, the TV presenter and Radio 1 DJ Vernon Kay, do not employ a nanny at their Buckinghamshire home. ("I just don't want to hand over responsibility for my kids to somebody else," she says. "Doesn't matter how good they are.") But perhaps it is also a consequence of a bruising few months. In February, Kay admitted sending a series of flirtatious text and Twitter messages to a page-three model he met in a Bolton nightclub. Although physical infidelity was flatly denied, the disclosures came as a shock to Daly, who was just about to publish a pregnancy book and who had, for seven years, seemingly enjoyed one of the most solid marriages in the public eye.
Ever the professional, Daly has soldiered on: the marriage is still intact, the couple have "worked through" their issues and she is looking forward to fronting a new series of Strictly Come Dancing, the hit BBC1 show that teams celebrities with professional dancers and then subjects them to the withering scrutiny of four judges. Daly's role in the show is to act as Bruce Forsyth's willing sidekick in a dazzling array of sequined taffeta and also to interview the celebrities backstage as they wait for their scores.
"I do genuinely give a damn about how the contestants do," says Daly. "Without sounding twee, I do care about them because I see them petrified in the morning, sitting in make-up, mute and waiting to get it over with. They've slogged their guts out most of the time. You get to know them and their families and you see pictures of their kids and they meet your kids. Yeah, you end up rooting for them."
Has she ever come across a contestant she couldn't stand? "Well, there have been a few egos," she concedes, "a few door-slammings in the producers' faces and that just doesn't work – it upsets the balance, because at the end of the day the more the group of celebrities get along, the better time they have of it. A lot of them make friendships that endure years later."
Last year, Strictly Come Dancing found itself at the centre of an ageism row after producers replaced the judge Arlene Phillips, then 66, with Alesha Dixon, a 30-year-old former winner with no professional experience. The decision attracted a stinging rebuke from the then equalities minister Harriet Harman. How was it for Daly turning 40 in an industry that reveres youthfulness? "I've just got to deal with it," she says, sipping from a mug of tea. "I can't obsess, I can't become somebody who grows old disgracefully, I'm not one of those people that tries to pin back the hands of time."
Has she ever encountered ageism or sexism? "Erm, not yet, but there's still time. Ask me in a few years." She gives a dry little laugh. "Obvious sexism? No, I haven't. I mean, obviously, this is a business that favours men as hosts without a doubt and they're often paid more for the same job so I guess you could call that sexism but, personally, I haven't come across it yet. Nothing that's damaged me or left a lasting impression. I'm the sort of person that just believes in getting on and making the most of the opportunity you've been given, you know: buckle down, work hard and hopefully you'll prove your worth. I've been working ever since I was 17 years old."
All of which is very admirable, but hasn't she ever stopped to consider why men in the industry are paid more for doing the same job? "I've no idea, it's just a fact," she continues, breezily. "I'm not complaining about that, I'm not making myself a martyr."
Clearly, she does not like the thought of whinging rather than just getting on with things. On several occasions, Daly mentions the fact that she has been working since she was 17 and one gets the impression that, as a result, her identity is irreversibly intertwined with her job and how well she feels she is doing it. She has recently branched out, developing her own line of beauty products that has rapidly become a multi-million pound business but, beneath it all, one gets the sense that she does not truly feel that television presenting counts as proper work – or at least, the hard graft her parents endured.
Daly was born in Stockport, the eldest of two girls. Her father, Vivian, worked in a wallpaper factory mixing dyes and her mother, Sylvia, did shifts in a paper mill alongside other jobs to keep the family financially stable. "They worked hard," she says. "They never complained. It seemed their mission in life was to provide for their kids and make us happy. It's only when you become a parent yourself you realise just how selfless that is. Their whole lives were geared just towards looking after us.
"My mum and dad considered a good job either nursing or working at a bank because, then, a job at a bank was for life and you had an interest-free mortgage and a pension. My mum thought that was the perfect job and tried to persuade me."
In spite of having taken her O-level maths a year early, Daly knew that the bank was not for her. Instead, she was scouted by a model agent outside McDonald's in Manchester who swiftly dispatched her to Tokyo as soon as she turned 18. Daly, who had only been out of the country once before, suddenly found herself on the other side of the world, friendless, in a place where she could not even understand the road signs or read a menu.
"Initially I was terrified… I could barely speak to anyone from home without crying and having to keep the tears from my voice because you didn't want them to worry about you. Yeah, it was tough. [I was] penniless as well and then I started to work a little bit and I really enjoyed it. Had to go through the pain barrier though."
She ended up learning a bit of Japanese. When I ask if she remembers any of it, she nods and says something like: "Skalam ska dishda," which apparently means, "Nice doing business with you," though she could quite possibly be saying, "A tuna sashimi wrap, thank you." Still, it sounds good.
In fact, Daly turns out to be full of such hidden depths. When, in a roundabout way, we start talking about inheritance tax, she turns out to have outspoken opinions on the matter. "It's disgraceful. It's effectively triple taxation because you've paid tax on your earnings, you then buy a property, you pay stamp duty for the privilege of buying it, and then you pay for it for 25 years; you want to pass it on to your kids, but you can't because they have to sell it immediately to pay 40% death duty. To pay taxes on a property that's been paid for with money that's been taxed!" Blimey! Does she consider herself political? "No, not really but there are things that I do feel quite strongly about and that is one of them."
From Tokyo, Daly went to New York, where a friend who organised red-carpet events asked her to try her hand at interviewing celebrities. Daly went out and bought a video camera and then, in search of suitable subjects, decided on a whim to call up Quentin Crisp, the author of The Naked Civil Servant was then living on the Lower East Side and listed his number in the phone book. Crisp agreed to be interviewed over lunch. "I loved him," says Daly. "Amazing guy. So intelligent and had been through so much."
The interview with Crisp ended up on a showreel that Daly sent off to the producers of The Big Breakfast, who offered her a regular slot hosting a model competition. Daly bought a plane ticket back to the UK ("It cost me a fortune!") and from there her TV career took off. Since then she has presented shows including Singled Out, SMTV Live, Make Me a Supermodel and is now into the eighth series of Strictly Come Dancing, which she describes as her "dream job".
Daly's father never got to see her on Strictly – he died of emphysema in 2003, just 18 days after he had walked her down the aisle. Daly was on honeymoon when she got the news. "Honestly it was so difficult," she says now. "I miss him terribly because he was just such a strong role model in my life. The man by whom I judged all others, really, because he was such an honourable and moral person who would never harm another being. Just a positive, outgoing… a great guy really and a brilliant father and I do really wish he could have met his grandchildren. That's my greatest regret, that he never met his grandchildren." Her voice softens to a cracked whisper. "Oh don't! I'll cry." She sniffs and looks away, embarrassed. "It doesn't get easier. You learn to live with it as a fact of life."
Her parents had been married for much of their adult lives. Having grown up with such a strong idea of what marriage should be, has Daly's faith in the institution been shaken by her husband's indiscretions? She looks at me blankly. "Erm, yeah, well, growing up with a mum and dad who were married for life, you do go into marriage with that expectation – be it naive because times have changed. But, personally, I would not get married unless I thought, 'This is it. We are in it for the long term,' because otherwise there would be no point, you might as well date. So I have gone into marriage with that expectation, but also with high standards. When you've lived alongside it, that's what you expect.
"So, yeah, it has, of course, been a difficult year and of course it shakes the foundations of what you believe in, but you learn from it. We were able to move on because we both want the same things – we want a loving family together.
"It's not easy when people are asking you all the time and you're trying to deal with something that is so acutely personal. It's really daunting when people ask you – people you don't know, in an interview situation – because you're dealing with it at home as best you can and actually we have moved on and things are good. And, being realistic, things will happen and it's whether or not you can move on from it and so…" She trails off and then nods her head firmly. "We've moved on and things are good."
But although I do not doubt her sincerity, I am not totally convinced. Interestingly, when Daly talks about the couple's children, she unwittingly lapses into the first person – it is always: "I haven't got a nanny," or "I'm looking at nursery as an option," and never "we". At one point she refers (albeit jokingly) to her husband as "my night nanny" and I am left with the impression that she is the one who keeps family life on track. Kay is five years younger than his wife and perhaps he is happy to let her assume responsibility, but it must be exhausting trying to keep on top of everything.
Is being in control important to her? Daly looks surprised. "In what way?" In the sense that you like to have things planned. "Well, you have to plan your childcare," she replies. "It's weird, I spent my adult years rebelling against routine but then, as a parent, kids demand routine, they need it, it makes them feel secure… So being in control? Nnn… I try to be organised. Being in control is a bit too strong."
Our allotted hour is drawing to a close and Daly has to go downstairs to have her photograph taken. As she gets up from the sofa, her shoulders visibly relax, her face lightens and she seems relieved the talking part is over. After all, she knows how to pose and smile and sparkle in front of a camera. It is just that I am not sure what happens to her when, out of the spotlight, the shimmer wears off.
Strictly Come Dancing starts on BBC1 on Saturday 2 October