SOMEONE recently said to Lis Howell that launching a television channel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. ‘I must be dead then,’ says Howell, waggishly. Howell was the director of programmes at GMTV who was sacked from her £100,000-a-year job amid rows about the F for fanciability factor. Now she is launching UK Living, a women’s satellite channel of which she is head of programming. UK Living, she says unrepentantly, will have the F-factor too. But this time, F stands for feminine.

UK Living welcomes girlies to agony aunts, Jayne Irving with chat, horoscopes and exercise, reruns of Delia Smith with creative cookery, reruns of Kilroy and reruns of Good Morning… with Anne and Nick. ‘A year ago if I’d been asked to do a women’s channel, I’d have said, ‘I don’t want to be ghettoised and sidelined.” Now she argues that the channel isn’t patronising. ‘It reflects what people do. Just because women traditionally do something doesn’t make it a demeaning, lower-grade activity.’ Howell, 42, changed her views after being sacked. ‘I had to fall back on my friends, family and the security of domestic detail. It suddenly became a pleasure to go to the school gates to meet my daughter or to bake.’ She is adept at plundering her experience for media purposes. She was actually only without a job for four days before she was given work on Good Morning… with Anne and Nick. Five weeks later, she was offered the UK Living job. Howell is wearing a white see-through T-shirt with sober suit and pearls, and is a small, bottle blonde with a northern accent and beseeching eyes. She looks tired, has a slightly forlorn air but speaks and thinks extremely fast.

When GMTV went on air in January, she was dubbed the most powerful woman in ITV. ‘That was hysterically funny. It doesn’t say much for women or TV.’ When ratings dropped, she pushed Michael Wilson off the sofa. They dropped further then under Big Breakfast competition and Greg Dyke (who with Roland Rat saved TV-am) stepped in and said F-off to the F-factor.

THE big problem was the F-factor, whereby Fiona Armstrong was encouraged to wear shorter skirts because she has great legs. Howell denies having played the game by the worst male rules. ‘I don’t regret it. It hit a truth and a nerve,’ she says realistically. ‘We live in a society which is confused about the way women behave, dress and act on TV.’ GMTV, running at a £10million loss, has only increased its 38 per cent audience share by 2 per cent since Howell left.

Howell was deeply distressed after being sacked. (She’s contractually obliged not to talk about her departure.) ‘I was shocked, upset and damaged. It was an alarming experience. I still feel scarred. Many women don’t like women achievers. When you fall from grace, people laugh, snigger and punch the air. But then there is support that you don’t expect.

‘I’m resilient but not tough. I get frightened and worried. I always think ‘maybe this is it’ and I’ll not be able to earn a living. I get scared that I’m not as good as I think I am. All sorts of self-doubts.’ Did she feel a failure? ‘Of course. But I was wrong. It’s the old female thing of ‘everything’s my fault’.’

Howell believes she is a feminist, hot on equal opportunities. (‘How on earth does taking a well-known and respected woman and making her as attractive as possible conflict with feminism?’ she remarked during the F debacle.) ‘I’m an organic feminist. That makes me sound like somebody who grows her own vegetables!’

Once she threatened to sue a newspaper when a journalist asked whether she exploited her own sexuality to get her way. Why did she consider it so damaging to be thus accused? ‘I find it offensive and hopefully inaccurate, although we all bat our eyelashes.’

She had a happy, lower middle-class childhood. ‘We were part of that aspirational post-war generation. Education was tremendously important.’ She was educated at Liverpool Institute for Girls.

She has said that there is no way somebody like herself is going to land a plum job at the BBC or ITN. Realistic? Or inferiority about being a grammar school girl from the provinces? ‘Maybe I’m a bit chippy,’ she replies. ‘When I moved to London I was resentful of metropolitan people. But it was fashionable to be chippy, and I have an opportunist element in me.’ She married a law student after she finished studying English at Bristol University. It lasted three years. ‘We both married too young. He has just married for the third time.’ For the last 13 years she has lived with reporter Ian Proniewicz. Why has she never married again? ‘That’s personal.’ Thinks quickly. ‘He’s never asked me!’ Giggles.

‘I don’t think marriage is particularly relevant. We might have got married when I was pregnant, but I couldn’t stand up half the time – let alone get down the aisle.’ (She had high blood pressure and had to lie on her back for six weeks before the birth.) She talks then about motherhood. Just eight years ago she dropped out in Cumbria in a well-documented interlude as a postmistress and earth mother. Aged 33, she had her daughter, Alex. She desperately wanted to go back to work. ‘Almost unheard of in Cumbria.’ Did she resent her child then? ‘No, because it took so long for her to be conceived. I was desperate to have a baby.’

Howell didn’t work for 18 months after Alex was born and felt ‘quite lost’. Does she lack the inner resources to be all right without the identity of a job? ‘I did wonder about that.’ At GMTV she was portrayed as a demonic worker. She didn’t socialise, and worked from 4am to 4pm. ‘I’m driven, in a way. But I’m not a workaholic.’ Driven because she needs to prove herself or make her mark in the world? ‘No.’