LAST week Myleene Klass came a very respectable third - behind Elizabeth Hurley and Victoria Beckham, no less - in a New Woman poll to find the celebrity whose body readers would most like to have. The result merely enhanced Klass's image as what the red tops like to call "a scorcher".

Klass was saddled with that tag after the celebrated incident when she was shown enjoying a jungle shower in a flimsy white bikini on ITV1's I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here at the end of last year. The pictures - which instantly acquired iconic status - were splashed all over the tabloid front pages. Overnight, she metamorphosed in those papers from "Myleene" to "sexy bikini babe Myleene". The bikini was even auctioned for charity.

Many people would have found the sudden attention of the red-tops overwhelming, but not this woman. She's a Klass act, a woman who might as well have "grounded" stamped in her passport. When I meet her in a so-hip-it-hurts central London hotel, the eminently sensible 28-year-old roars with laughter when, as delicately as possible, I try to raise the matter of her image as a "red-hot sizzler".

Klass, who is now presenting an upmarket cinema show, The Screening Room, on CNN International, says: "The 'sexy babe' image was so far from how I was feeling at that time on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here. I was tired, hungry and worried about what my mum would think of the whole show - 'What have they done to my poor daughter?' As I was in the shower, there was a queue of people waiting to use it next, and all I was thinking was: 'I've got to get out of here now - I've only got two minutes till my rice boils.' I didn't feel remotely sexy."

Klass, who first came to prominence six years ago when she triumphed in the ITV show Popstars, and went to form Hear'Say with the four other winners, is media savvy enough to realise the producers knew full well what they were doing focusing on her in the shower. They were merely adhering to that age-old adage: sex sells.

"That day, as well as cooking the rice, I built two tables, caught fish, used the skills I had learned watching Tom Hanks on Castaway to light a fire, and was so bitten by bugs that my legs were entirely covered in yellow iodine. That was my day. So it's hilarious that the only footage they used was of me in the shower!"

Does she view the papers' reaction to the shower sequence as demeaning, though? Again, her answer reveals a commendable maturity. Sweeping her glossy brown mane away from her eyes, she says: "I don't see it as a negative image. I haven't killed anyone. I don't gossip. I don't sit around doing nothing. I'm really positive. I like to be proactive. I would have been much more worried if the papers had written I was lazy!"

This highly intelligent young woman - she started learning the violin and piano at the age of four and as a teenager won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music - clearly knows how to deal with the press. She coped with dignity when, in 2005, her fiancé, Graham Quinn, was given a 3,000 fine and a suspended jail sentence for drug offences committed in Dublin nine years previously. She weathered the storm with admirable equanimity: "We've been through so much, and we never argued at all during the police thing and the court case. I think if we can get through that, we can get through anything."

She also had to endure wildly inaccurate press stories about her role in the break-up of Hear'Say in 2002: "It gets to you when you have to be on the defensive all the time. I said to journalists, 'Do you want to hear the real story?', but they didn't. I soon realised I was wasting a lot of energy over something that was categorically not true. Instead of listening to things that were not true from A to Z, I just had to start my own alphabet. I know they need a story - I had to make it my job to find them a new one."

In the same way, Klass has got her head screwed on when the subject of size-zero models comes up. "I work in an industry of size-zero people," she says. "Suddenly, I came along, this woman with bits that wobble. If that's the female image I represent, then fine. It's not a role I've chosen - it's just genetic. But I do think I have a responsibility to speak out about it.

"I've had parents coming up to me and talking about dietary issues for their five-year-old children. I grab them by the collar and say, 'Why are you talking about diets in front of a five-year-old?' Another time when I was teaching dance, a five-year-old said to me, 'I'm not eating lunch because Mummy never does.' Mummy's teaching little Elsie these terrible habits. Elsie needs energy."

There will surely be more interest in Klass's figure after last week's announcement that she and Quinn are expecting their first child in seven months' time.

Klass's pregnancy will no doubt prompt more intrusive red-top coverage, but you feel she will be well able to handle it. The most cursory glance at her CV confirms that there is far more to Klass than lads' mag cover-girl fodder. As well as being the new face of M&S, she is fronting regular shows on both Classic FM and Capital FM, and is co-presenting BBC1's The National Lottery People's Quiz on Saturday nights. As if that wasn't enough, she is also regularly performing and recording classical music.

Her classical album, Moving On, was nominated for a Brit Award in 2004, and she is already getting nervous about a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in May. Klass, who lives with Quinn in South London, laments that she has had just six days off since Christmas "and those were laundry days. Can't you see the bags under my eyes?"

Taking in features on such unusual subjects as "Nollywood" (the Nigerian film industry, which is the world's third biggest after India and the US), The Screening Room aims to eschew the conventional, fawning PR-led movie coverage.

Klass, a card-carrying film buff who will be interviewing stars such as Lauren Bacall, Samuel L Jackson and Sienna Miller for the new series, explains the thinking behind The Screening Room.

"I've been interviewed myself and been on both sides of the sofa. Having seen my face six feet tall up there on the screen, I hope I understand actors' insecurities. But on The Screening Room, I'm not just going to do sycophantic, 'So what attracted you to this role?'-style interviews. I know when people are trying to steer away from a certain question. I won't be tough, just thorough."

However, she adds, with a steely grin: "I won't put up with it if stars try to stall me by telling me they're tired. You can't afford to be tired in this business. Look, my mother used to work 20-hour shifts saving people's lives as a nurse. So I'll get annoyed if actors say they're tired. If they claim they need to go and lie down in a darkened room, I simply won't accept it!"

She has certainly packed in an astonishing amount since impressing "Nasty" Nigel Lythgoe at the Popstars auditions in 2001, but does she ever worry about over-exposure? Apparently not. She just seems eager to soak up as many different experiences as quickly as possible.

Perhaps her most appealing trait is her refusal to take her success for granted. "Have you ever tried so hard for something that when you finally get it, you can't quite believe it? You feel it's too good to be true. I used to be a strawberry-picker in Norfolk. Now I can travel round the world waving a CNN pass and interviewing the heroes I used to sit watching in my local cinema, Every day, I still have to pinch myself that this is happening to me."

Whingeing about the stress of success is just not Myleene Klass's style. "I don't know why some people on I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here went into the rainforest saying: 'Why is it raining? Why are there all these bugs biting me? Why are there so many trees giving me hayfever?' A lot of girls would kill to do what I do. So I owe it to them to say, 'Yes, this is all it's cracked up to be!'"

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