CAROLINE PHILLIPS asks TV guru Michael Barratt to help in her quest to become cool on camera and just like a very, very famous weather girl.

SOME are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have it pinned on them through being television presenters. This is why I want to be Tania Bryer and have spent weekends on Learn to be Tania Bryer courses. The media training industry has mushroomed like satellite dishes over the past decade. And when it comes to training, I’m a course-aholic.

I start off in Hillside Studios, Bushey, in front of a camera, surrounded by floor manager, sound technicians, lighting and cameramen. (Hillside started as a place to train clergy to put over their message on television; now it trains everyone from chef Wozza to prison screws.) For this exercise, I’ve been told to think about press intrusion but the voice through my earpiece is nattering about bike trips in Amsterdam.

The cameras are about to roll. Suddenly I remember the recent transport minister on television proclaiming the road behind him utterly safe, just as two cars crashed. And Dan Quayle getting muddled on the box about the Nazi Holocaust. ‘It was,’ Quayle said, ‘an obscene period in our nation’s history, no, not our nation’s but World War II, I mean, we all lived in this century, er, I didn’t live in this century but…’ (People think it’s easy to be on television, until they try it.) ‘Stand by,’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Two to go, one to go, 30, and…’ The floor manager motions as if to cut his own throat. The cameras start to roll. My brain takes a vacation, my smile becomes Sky-high and my mouth feels as if it’s been in the desert for 46 days without water. Nearby is the control room (glad someone around here feels in control) with its bank of monitors.

Now the course leader, science programme presenter Su Ingle, is interviewing me on camera. ‘Have you ripped anybody to shreds of late?’ she asks, sweetly. (Presumeably talking about my work.) Doing this naked would probably be only marginally worse. I try to think myself into being Tania, the girl without whom the launch of a new range of Hermes shoelaces or opening of a (Gucci) plastic bag would be incomplete. To look relentlessly happy, like Tania, the darling of the social circuit.

Unfortunately, I’m wearing a too-shiny-for-television shirt, distracting earrings and clip mike which turns out to be the communications industry equivalent of a ball and chain whenever I move. But I develop a good line in monosyllabic replies. Answers matched only by the length of my Bryer-style skirt. Then we wind up the interview. (Telespeak for turning the cameras off.) Su later tells me that she once did a programme live, with a temperature of 105 degrees and a nurse standing nearby spraying her with water.

Next I’m in solitary confinement in what they call their ‘remote studio’, to give what they call an ‘immediate reaction’ to sticky questions. Ready to turn my brain from Moscow coups to chiropody campaigns. Looking straight at camera, peering into its disconcerting lens. I cannot see my inquisitor, only hear her questions. I do brilliantly. But then we both (the former weather girl and I) have a degree in politics. There’s no question about it, I am Tracey Sunshine, as Tania is known. Time to wind up, again. Now fast forward to another place, another time. Remind yourself of gravelly voiced Michael Barratt, the former Nationwide presenter turned media consultant. Known in the TV world as Grumpy, he is straight-talking and professional. He has nine children, was the first person to expose the Kray twins on air and thinks television is full of giggly girls who have been given their jobs because of their sex appeal. I follow up my training with him. This also gives me a chance to nip into another outfit, like my heroine.

GRUMPY says he wants me to ‘grasp the basics’, and has set up a temporary studio in his office for me to do so. The camera perches precariously over his desk. First of all I have to interview Joyce, who teaches people how to talk on the phone. Telephone voice training she called it. It is clear that (like Tania) I am thus well en route to becoming a pin-up for the troops in Ireland.

Next I have to ad lib to camera for two minutes about election night and five about travelling around Australia on a bus. Then I interview Grumpy. ‘Michael, you were hugely successful. Now you’re stuck in Maidenhead doing corporate videos and training. What happened?’ He says that’s a daft question and I wonder whether I should show him my Tania Bryer legs and Esther Rantzen knees. Lis Howell, former programme director of GMTV, once told me she’d make a feature of my pegs. The Phillips Factor. ‘Excellent eyes, good face, your fingers give away your nervousness,’ encourages Michael. ‘I’m getting excited about you. You’re improving fast.’ Michael was known as Take One Barratt, because he always used his first take. But that’s clearly not going to be my style. ‘In my experience the best performers in television are shy people,’ says Michael, hiding behind his jazzy tie.

I have my home videos of myself on the box, which I was given after the courses; ‘pilots’ I like to call them. So where do I go from here? Just as I’m beginning to despair of being Tania Bryer in this lifetime, I’m summoned for a screen test with producer Vicki Barass, of the hit show The Good Sex Guide. She is looking for a presenter to report from the front line of women’s experience on topics like body hair, family meals and feminine wiles. To look at the big questions of our times, like who gets the worst deal – wife number one or two?

My screen test takes place al fresco in the busy shopping precinct of South Molton Street. This is what you have to do when seeking the giddy stardom of satellite TV meteorology.

‘As women work, are men’s biological impulses going to change to fit this new social trend? Is his first smouldering stare going to assess not the size of your bra cup but your wallet?’ I announce to the camera and passers-by. I’m an exhibitionist, loving it. People stop and stare. The waiters in the cafe congregate at the window. At last I am a Waif (one of the Why am I famous brigade?) THEN I have to do vox pops and ask strangers questions: ‘Are men scared stiff if they think they’re talking to a woman who is cleverer than them?’ I ask. ‘And do you think you’re clever?’ ‘Erm, yep,’ replies a bald artist who is chewing gum. ‘Do men like women to be more stupid than themselves?’ I enquire of three harridans. ‘Sphlunk, vosh splosh yert,’ they say. Presumably they’re not English.1 It’s astonishing how you can accost strangers in the street and they will reveal intimate details about themselves if you’re accompanied by a camera crew. ‘I’m very brilliant,’ confides an Italian psychologist with giraffe eyelashes. That makes two of us…

Anyone want to hire me (no previous experience) to read their weather maps?