Jonathan Ross: The likely lad

A hero in the Eighties, a zero in the Nineties, the man with the elusive 'r' would admit to a rollercoaster career - if he could pronounce it. He now presides over 3.5 million Radio 2 listeners and is tipped for greatness all over again...

It's been a good week for Jonathan Ross. Not only have the latest audience ratings clocked his Radio 2 Saturday morning show as having a healthy 3.5 million listeners, but he's also been heavily tipped to take over Chris Tarrant's flagship breakfast programme on London's Capital Radio. And then there was a brace of Sony radio awards in May. In fact he's starting, at the age of 42, to move into the enviable position of lovable institution - the kind of media face (and voice, with its trademark soft Rs) that's been around for so long that it's a comfortable part of the furniture - a post-punk Ronnie Corbett perhaps, Terry Wogan in a leopard-print kilt.

If he does take over Tarrant's mantle, it will be instructive to see whether the style of the Saturday show will transfer to the playlist- driven, win-a-million-a-day-with-your-cornflakes format that Capital prefers. Certainly Ross's lad-lite banter would make the switch easily enough: last week's programme featured a somewhat off-colour item on hunting naked woman with paintball guns in the Nevada desert, and he famously told Victoria Beckham, at the height of the "is she or isn't she anorexic?" speculation, "I'd like to give you a pie. I'd like to give you a pie right now." But the chat sits alongside a selection of quirky Seventies and Eighties hits of the kind that have children squirming in embarrassment at their fortysomething parents at a wedding disco. Capital plays it a lot safer, rotating Top 20 hits and recent club favourites with tiresome regularity.

And then there's his residency as the BBC's chief film critic. Some were disappointed that his encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema somehow mapped into a style that had more in common with his medium-brow Daily Mirror column than it did with Barry Norman's more solid reviews. An interview with Tom Cruise and director Cameron Crowe still rankles as a particularly irksome slice of sycophancy. Nevertheless, he looks comfortable in his own skin and it's worth noting that Norman's tenancy ran from the early 1970s for the better part of 30 years.

Ross's boss at Radio 2, James Moir, offers high praise, saying: "He has the fastest mind to mouth of anybody that I have ever worked with in my long career. He has a kind of renaissance feel about him - he's extremely gifted - and all that is informed by a high intelligence."

Ross was born in Camden, London, in 1960 and raised in east London's working-class Leytonstone. One of six children, all of whom now work in the media (his brother Paul is a stalwart of shows that make Jonathan's output look highbrow), he grew up in a family that he has described as "relentlessly self-improving" and where, according to Paul, there was "an elevated regard for television". His mother Maureen - later to become a regular extra on EastEnders - put all the children forward for advertisements, Jonathan appearing on behalf of Persil and Rice Krispies around the same time as a young Michael Portillo was grinning his way through a glass of Ribena. Despite having to retake his O-levels ("they coincided with punk") he gained a place at London University's School of East European and Slavonic Studies to read modern history - a stepping stone to MI5 for some, a stepping stone to C4 for Ross.

After four years as a researcher on various Channel 4 youth shows, in 1986 Ross and a colleague, Alan Marke, came up with a format derived from David Letterman's then anarchic US chat show. When comedian and writer Jeremy Hardy told Ross to "fuck off" when he cornered Hardy in a pub toilet to try to recruit him as a presenter, Ross - the last resort - was given a chance to present his own baby, now suitably titled The Last Resort. The show, with its irreverent yet star-struck young presenter and trashy sideshows of circus freaks, ran for four years and made Ross a household name, although, as he said, "Every day I panicked. I was paralysed, sick with nerves."

Ross and Marke founded their own production company, Channel X, in part to find vehicles to further Ross's career. Along with one-off profiles of the film directors he revered - he still maintains that a film he made on Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki is his best work - he gave Vic Reeves and Caroline Aherne early television breaks and stood in for Terry Wogan on his evening chat show to critical approval. But when his Saturday night showpiece The Saturday Zoo flopped he sold his shares in Channel X for £1 and turned to being a presenter for hire - to distinctly mixed success. Low points such as ITV's The Big Big Talent Show and the truly dreadful game show Gag Tag suggested that, by the mid-1990s, Ross might have been a busted flush, but a stint on Virgin Radio in 1998 showed that the motormouth was well suited to the wireless. A transfer to Radio 2 in 1999 kick-started a rehabilitation that led to Film 1999, the chat show Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, a team captaincy on sports quiz They Think It's All Over and what seems like a job for life as host of the Baftas.

Alongside the high media profile, Ross epitomises the image of the kooky parent. With a wardrobe that suggests he took the full force of an explosion at a Jackie Collins car-boot sale, numerous hi-tech toys and a classic comic collection kept in a study hidden behind a revolving bookshelf in his Hampstead home, he is middle youth writ large. His children face the challenges of the playground with the names Betty Kitten, Harvey Kirby and Honey Kinney and his reputedly stormy marriage to former wild-child journalist Jane Goldman, whom he married when she was 16, has led to speculation as to how long the couple can stay together.

She is said to have dallied with Canadian guitarist Ed Robertson, spent time in the Priory being treated for depression and reduced Ross to public tears last summer after allegedly getting a little too close to comedian Sean Hughes. During a short-lived estrangement in 1999, Goldman said, "When we had really horrendous fights I could feel it destroying what we had. We're both hideously dirty fighters." Ross told an interviewer: "When I was away from her, I thought of her with love, but when she was around I probably acted as if I found her quite irritating, which I think would have worn anyone out." Yet they make a point of consistently proclaiming their love and commitment and Ross is on record as saying "it sounds mawkish, but I just want to be a good dad".

Why then, when he's unlikely ever to be short of a bob or two, would this devoted parent and die-hard fan of all the kitsch he surveys want to get up at 5am to play Will Young and So Solid Crew? Ross once told David Letterman: "It's very hard to be taken off the air in Britain. I've made some good shows and some bad shows, but they just let you keep on making them." With Ross's BBC contract up for renewal by next summer, the Capital rumours might simply be showing the hand of a smart agent unsettling a needy employer. Add to that James Moir's comments that "this is a peak time for him and his radio show has become an appointment to listen ... challenging the audiences achieved in prime-time television", and it seems unlikely that London's commuters will be waking up to the Leytonstone lad and his favourite Jam singles for the foreseeable future.