General: Winter of bewildering content for Barker

From tennis to toboggans to tomfoolery, the Beeb rely on their front-woman

It is as well that Sue Barker is easy on the eye and gentle on the ear. Over the next few weeks, she will become a fixture in the nation's living rooms. If it is not the finals of the Australian Open, it will be Davis Cup tennis or the evening highlights show from the Winter Olympics, or you can still catch arguably her most persuasive performance as the benevolent schoolma'm in A Question of Sport.

Outwardly, the BBC wailed and gnashed at the defection of Des Lynam to ITV; inwardly, the role as the BBC's chief presenter was already auditioned and filled. Not bad for a former French Open champion and world number three who still regards her television career as an unexpected bonus.

Like all good broadcasters, what you see with Sue is what you get. There are no airs and graces, for all the 15th-century mansion and the full garage, no attempts to test the patience of the viewers. She presents sport much as she played it, with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye.

"And now," as her producer whispered into the earpiece before her first presentation at Wimbledon, "Sue Barker will broadcast to 100m people." Thanks very much, she thought to herself, but barely a syllable has fallen out of place since, not even when a drunken punter tried to disrupt her introductory lines at the Grand National by chucking coins across the BBC's enclosure or when a rain-delay debate between Barker, Chris Evert, John Lloyd and Pam Shriver turned into a scene from Jerry Springer. "Did you two ever go out?" asked Pam of John and Sue in all innocence. Cue silence. "Oh no, I don't believe it," screamed Pam and the ex-Mrs Lloyd in unison. The BBC were scheduled to run a tape-delayed doubles match, but stayed with the real thing.

On court, Barker was the golden girl of her generation, an Anna Kournikova who could play. Her broadcasting apprenticeship was unwittingly served on the tennis courts of the world. "I was quite a shy kid, but tennis knocked that out of me," she says. "If you could walk out on to Centre Court wearing one of those little tennis dresses and strut your stuff, there's not much better preparation. You lose your self-consciousness and self-doubt. The strange thing is that I'd rather sit in front of a camera broadcasting to millions than stand up and speak to 12 people in a room."

Yet Barker's understanding of the cruelties of sport makes her an instinctively sensitive interviewer. One afternoon in 1977, a bubbly, confident, 20-year-old strode on to the Centre Court and a shell-shocked veteran returned. Had she beaten Betty Stove in that semi-final, as she did, 6-1, 6-0 three weeks later, would we be celebrating Barker, not Virginia Wade, as the silver jubilee champion?

"That match destroyed me," she reflects. "I had no fear of anyone before that day. But afterwards I got so inwardly depressed. I began to suffer from anaemia." Had she watched the final? "No, I went out and spent an obscene amount of money. I didn't care who won. But I do wonder what would have happened if I had beaten Betty. Maybe I'd be sitting on my yacht in Monte Carlo, being rich and miserable."

Instead, she and her husband, Lance, a former policeman turned property developer, own a healthy slice of Surrey real estate and Sue, when not polishing up her knowledge of Norwegian cross-country skiers, plays part-time shepherdess to the neighbour's team of 11 sheep, a marginally simpler task than rounding up John Parrott and Ally McCoist in the QoS studio. From analyst on HBO in the States and Channel Seven in Australia to BSB, the original satellite network, from BSkyB to the BBC, the graph of her broadcasting career has shown barely a blip. "I'm either going to hire you or fire you," announced Dave Hill, the blunt Australian who catapulted Sky Sports to prominence. Barker knew Hill from her days in Australia. The hire sign was posted.

"He told me to turn up on such and such a date so I did, expecting to be put on a training course," she recalls. "When I walked in, Dave shouted, 'Where have you been? You're on air in two hours'. I did continuity work, two or three items four or five times a day. It was a perfect introduction to the business."

And when David Coleman was taken ill on the eve of QoS, Barker willingly filled the breach. "I still don't know how far down the list of possible fill-ins I was, but John and Ally helped me out and when David retired the following year, I was in the ideal position to take over. It was luck."

Now, Ally, John and Sue are in their fifth year and still going strong. On the eve of the shows, Barker runs through all the questions, tries to answer them without cheating just to check her own knowledge. She is pretty good, she reckons. Norwegian skiers and Latvian lugers a speciality, of course.