Last month Phillip Schofield took over from Jason Donovan, one of the world’s biggest singing stars, in the leading role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Palladium. Before Schofield stood in for him for six weeks in January, he had only ever sung in the bath, and his previous stage experience was limited to two stage productions and a walk-on part in a children’s variety show.

He is now rumoured to earn around £500,000 a year from television and public appearances. He has been compared to Barbie Doll’s boyfriend Ken and dubbed a taciturn man of plastic responses and controlled gestures. A man who, in particular, has consistently refused to discuss his affair with his girlfriend Stephanie Lowe or speculation that he is homosexual. Today Schofield, 30, talks for the first time about his private life. So what about the accusations that he is gay? ‘Pheeee,’ he says, blowing the air. ‘Nobody has ever said that to my face. People say all sorts of things, about how much I earn and so on.’ He is talking fast and nervously. ‘It makes no odds to me what people say, but I think my girlfriend would have something to say about it.’ He nurses his shoulders while he is speaking, in a gesture of self-comfort, with his arms crossed defensively across his body.

Has he ever had a sexual relationship with a man, even as a schoolboy? ‘No. That sort of thing didn’t happen at my comprehensive,’ he says, sitting in yellow shorts like bathing trunks and a sleeveless USA Sporting T-shirt. He has airbrushed good looks and copper eyes, with spiky gelled hair and bronzed shoulders to match. ‘I never felt like it, no, absolutely not. Quite a lot of men I know have, but not necessarily me. I would never sleep with a man, but I’m not homophobic.’ He does, however, sometimes have a camp-cum-thespian way of expressing himself.

People, I remark, say that he has a girlfriend as a cover-up. Schofield throws his head back and laughs loudly. ‘You can’t win then, can you? But I’d defy them to find any evidence of this allegation.’ Why does he think people say such things about him? ‘I don’t know. Maybe because I’m fresh-faced. Maybe because I’m not open, so people assume there is something to hide.’ He continues to cuddle himself. ‘I just don’t talk about my private life, so people start saying, ‘There’s no smoke without fire’, but that’s not true. I’m secretive because you have to keep something private.’ He lost his virginity when he was 14 and, contrary to reports, never proposed either to his half-Russian girlfriend Marika Tautz when he was 22 or to anyone else. He now receives up to 500 letters a week from girls, has been on the front cover of Smash Hits, has a fervent young following, and is a registered heart-throb who is embarrassed to go out and buy underpants. He has known Stephanie for five years, from the days before he had to cope with adulation.

So how important to him is his girlfriend, freelance production assistant Stephanie Lowe? And does he intend to marry her? ‘We’ve not discussed marriage. But we’ve been living together for a year,’ he says. ‘I never shared a flat before I lived in London,’ he says. ‘I always ended up in a bedsit on my own and had to have stair parties because the room was too small to invite people in. So it’s taken a lot to get used to having someone else in the house and having their things around. ‘Now I like it. I like having someone to come home to and discuss things with. I like coming home when the lights are on in the house, bread’s being baked and the garden is mowed.’ They live together in a comfortable Victorian house in west London.

Is he in love? ‘I think so, I think so. What does being in love mean? We get on very well. She’s very close to me and we’re good mates. Love is about trusting someone, having them trust you, enjoying seeing them, liking their company.’ As he talks about Stephanie, his voice, which was loud and performance-like at the beginning of the interview, becomes quieter and less defensive, and his face softens.

Does he trust women? ‘Yeah,’ he stumbles, tapping his face with his hand. ‘But that’s a tricky one. You’re told that people love you all the time, so when it’s actually said genuinely it’s difficult to take notice of it. You end up analysing it too much rather than accepting it at its face value.’ Unlike many performers, he doesn’t appear to have the desperate need to feel loved by his audiences. ‘I’m not that insecure.’

And is he monogamous? ‘I tend to be monogamous because I’m terrified of Aids,’ he has said. ‘I tend to be monogamous because I am quite loyal,’ he says now. ‘That’s how I’ve led my life. I would hate to tear someone apart by them hearing that I’d had an affair.’

He finds such scrutiny of his private life makes living in the public eye difficult. He feels vulnerable being a big star. And he says he finds himself performing the whole time. ‘It’s a strange lifestyle. You’re never finished being on show.’

He finds it difficult to be vulnerable now. ‘I do it behind closed doors. Or it gets suppressed completely and you lose a part of yourself. I think the part of me that relies on other people is rather undernourished. You end up making yourself more independent than you would have been. ‘I’ve probably become more confident than I would have been and I also have a self-preservation order slapped on the inside of my eyelids.’ He has also lost many of his old friends (partly because he found it difficult to keep up with them when he went to New Zealand when he was 19). ‘A few just haven’t been able to cope with my job. It was far too strange for them to comprehend.’

Schofield is a pleasant man with an open face, who seems a reliable, optimistic sort. ‘I do have quite a short fuse,’ he admits. ‘But I haven’t lost my temper for a long time,’ he says. ‘I have a really vile temper when it rears its ugly head. I once kicked a phone off the wall in an old flat of mine. It was stealing 10p pieces like it was going out of fashion.’ More recently, he fell out with a man who had sold Schofield insurance that didn’t properly cover his mobile phone. Hearing the man was in hospital having a knee operation, Schofield offered to go in and ‘kneecap’ the other leg.

‘I’m surprised by my success – but not in television, I worked really hard at that,’ he says. According to his manager, he’s having problems with his voice. ‘Joseph is better this time round. Before I was having to prove myself, which made it a burden.’

Schofield was born, memorably, on an April Fool’s Day. ‘My mother was mortified and tried to persuade the midwife to write that I was born the day before. Until I was about seven, she told me that I’d been born after midday, ‘So you’re not a fool’.’

He had a solid family base and his parents encouraged him in his chosen profession. His father (now retired) was a french polisher. His mother worked in an old people’s home until she took over responsibility for Schofield’s mail. And his younger brother has a record shop in Cornwall. He started writing job application letters to the BBC when he was just 10 years old and also turned his bedroom into a mock television station, which he would close down each night before he went to bed. Until only 10 years ago, he used to keep crickets in a tank to lull him to sleep at night. ‘All true, I’m afraid,’ he says, with a slight Antipodean lilt in his accent. Ten years ago, his father suffered a heart attack. ‘It was very traumatic at the time. I don’t want to talk about it. It was one of the most frightening things that ever happened. One day he came home, went into the kitchen for a glass of water, came back and dropped dead in the chair. I’d learned artificial respiration by watching some American cop show on television. So I did that for 10 minutes.’ His father then had quadruple bypass surgery and Schofield got a certificate saying that he’d saved his life.

Now things are on the up and up. He won’t talk about how much he earns. But he drives a convertible green BMW and hopes to earn enough money to last him if the phone ever stops ringing. ‘I don’t have any ambitions. They’ve all been used up,’ he says, smiling a television smile. ‘I sometimes wonder whether, when I die, I’m going to leave anything behind. I worry about that less, now that I’m on at the Palladium. I’ve stood on a stage that so many famous people have stood on. Now I feel that I’ve achieved something.’