Brown girl in the ring (with some new guy)

By CATHRIN SCHAER

She never really wanted to be on television.

"I didn't want to have to scrutinise every angle of my face and get paranoid about what people thought of me," explains Jaquie Brown, hostess with the mostest for the past two seasons on TV2's music-and-youth-issues show, Space.

Which is why her path to youth-television super-stardom started off with a job in student radio and a love of popular culture. But after being persuaded to audition for Space, she got the job she now loves, alongside former co-host Dominic Bowden.

"I think what probably gave me a slight advantage was the ability to talk quickly about nothing," Brown explains, a useful skill she picked up from radio work. And, apparently, she recalls with a laugh, it wasn't her appearance.

"When I got the job my boss told me: Dominic had been hired for the looks and I'd been hired for the other stuff," recalls the elfin 26-year-old with spikey black hair and an English-rose complexion.

"I still don"t know whether that's a compliment to my mind or an insult to my face."

Unfortunately, when Space first started, neither Bowden nor Brown was greeted with rapturous acclaim by television critics. Bowden was described by this newspaper as "cheerful but nervous" and Brown as "smart but muddled".

Sure, when Brown read those words, it hurt. "When you start you can't divorce yourself from the product and I was like 'oh no, you hate me, I suck'."

But she now agrees. "They were actually right. We did suck."

Admittedly it could also have been the mildly uncomfortable vibe between two people who had only just met and who were obviously very different in real life. Even the fans noticed.

As planned, Bowden, a seasoned children's TV presenter, tended towards the cute and fluffy and Brown was his more intellectual, dark-humoured foil - something which probably also made the good-natured British native seem more serious than she is.

"Dom and I were thrown into a forced closeness," Brown says, "and that spawned a very uncomfortable year of television. He didn't know if I was joking and I didn't know what he was talking about.

"Dominic is just this crazy, fun-loving guy with a hysterical sense of humour, who loves to drink champagne and go out. Last time I saw him he'd grown a moustache. And you've got to love him for that. Whereas I think I'm crazy and fun-loving, too, I'm just a little bit more introverted."

But she now says such criticism was not necessarily a bad thing. "From that we both went through this whole process. We both knew that we just had to make this show better."

And they did. The co-hosts grew closer, began to understand each other"s jokes and the show grew up. Segments were more diverse and interviews more illuminating.

But whatever you do just don't call Brown that wacky girl from the quirky music show.

"Because it's just such a cliche and I don't want to be a cliche," she says. "Sometimes I worry that just because I'm on a music show that I'm seen as a sugar-coated TV girl.

"OK, I do perform to the market but I also like to look at things in a bit more depth. And hopefully that comes across so that maybe people might think, 'she's not thick, she's actually quite nice'."

"Funny" and "intelligent" are two descriptions that please her - maybe it's because despite two seasons on the telly, she's still pretty sensitive about how people see her. After all, she often gets bad service at cafes "just because people think that I"ll think that they think I'm cool because I'm on TV!"

Now, arriving for its third season, Brown likens Space to a little bicycle. "We've had those stabiliser wheels on until now but I think they're coming off."

Apart from more diverse subject matter, lots of cross-country travels and new graphics, the other big difference between the old Space and the new will be the absence of Bowden, a fact likely to be lamented loudly by his legion of teenage female fans.

"He's off to Sydney to work where he'll either end up on Home and Away or as an underwear model," quips Brown. He will be replaced by Hugh Sundae, a relatively familiar face and voice to viewers of TV3's Ice As and listeners to bFM.

Together Brown and Sundae, who already know each other from time spent at student radio, have completed the series" first show, a Big Day Out special which is to screen tomorrow night.

"I"ve never worked so hard in my life," says Brown, who came away from the BDO experience happy but incredibly tired and with wrinkled, prune feet from having been caught in the rain several times.

Her best moments were about your typical sex, drugs and rock'n'roll - Brown helped to smuggle groupies into silverchair's hotel, interviewed the security people who were confiscating drugs, found two of the audience getting a bit too intimate and shedding clothes in the dance tent (sensibly she separated them) and talked to members of the drum'n'bass unit Kosheen, who were wasted and swigging wine from a bottle as they were being filmed.

Besides the rock stars, she also scrutinised lost shoes. Yes, shoes.

"You see one random lost shoe lying there and you think to yourself that, 'hey, there must be somebody out there walking around with just one shoe on'," she says, bemused. "Surely they've noticed? Why aren't they looking for their shoe? What were they thinking? I mean, that shoe was there for four hours."

Believe it or not, it's those kinds of curious questions that keep Brown motivated.

"It's not the music even though music does interest me immensely," she says. Her wishlist of interviewees would include admired British comedians like Eddie Izzard, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, as well as any interesting authors and innovative, art house film directors.

"If it was purely a music show I would be bored. But a camera for Space is like a safety blanket that allows you to ask people, 'what were you thinking when you did that? And why? For me the best thing about this job is totally, one hundred per cent, about meeting people and finding out what goes on in their minds."