Tributes show Jill Dando really was the girl next door

The red roses and carnations were wrapped in plastic and placed beside the railings of a Fulham home. An eight-year-old girl had written a note dedicated to Jill Dando and she had drawn a colourful picture of her favourite TV presenter at the top of the page and stuck it on to the wrapping of her flowers.

"I was very sad about the sad news," the girl wrote. "I will miss you. I always used to watch the Holiday programme."

Jill Dando's murder on Monday by a single gunshot to the head on the doorstep of her Fulham home in south London has drawn a response from the British public and beyond not seen since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Just like Diana, people have said, the loss of this beautiful, witty woman in horrible circumstances leaves everybody wondering why.

Sifting through the many tributes from Dando's colleagues on BBC's Six O'Clock News, the Holiday programme and Crimewatch UK there was one obvious theme to it all. There were no sides to her, she was "a generous, open, friendly person."

Most of us are familiar with British personalities recast in a positive spotlight that jars with their home-life reality. But for the woman who posed for Hello! with her fiance, Dr Alan Farthing, to whom she had become engaged in January, the essence of her appeal to millions of viewers was that she really was the girl-next-door, the girl men would most like to go on holiday with.

"What you saw was what you got, and what you got was what you saw," said Nick Ross, her co-presenter on Crimewatch UK. She turned heads in the street, he told BBC's Newsnight programme in a voice cracking with emotion. She was a good-looking woman, but it wasn't just the men who wanted a second look. Women also admired her unspoilt charm, her professionalism and her unthreateningly sexy dress sense.

Caller after caller to the BBC spoke of a sense of loss of this woman in such appallingly violent circumstances because, through television, they felt they knew her.

One commentator wrote earlier this week that Jill Dando was perceived, like Diana, "as an icon of cleanliness in a dirty world - perhaps even a more perfect, more truly English unspoilt Diana, unbroken by fads and fancies and psychics and playboys."

On television Dando, the middle-class, middle-England girl who worried about her wonky teeth and glasses as a teenager, was the perfectly safe face of the BBC. Its tribute to her, screened on Monday night, was presented by Des Lynam, another understated sex symbol whose appeal to a certain type of middle-aged woman was the perfect partner for Dando's home-grown charm when they teamed up on screen.

Watching this tribute, it was barely believable that this smiling, happy woman, roller-blading on the Holiday programme or anchoring breakfast news on the morning Gorbachev fell from power was now lying dead in a west London mortuary.

There was a poignant irony that the personification of the girl next door was murdered on her doorstep. And yet as much as she tried to protect her private life while living a public life in front of the camera, in the manner of her death Jill Dando attracted the ugliest, most violent form of attention.

Since her days as a young reporter on the Western Mercury when she covered the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, to the days of national status on the Holiday programme and Crimewatch UK and the Six O'Clock News, Jill Dando was the embodiment of achievement through sheer guts and hard work.

Yet for all that she once unflatteringly described herself as "Blando Dando", and in that light one might take a second look at the Radio Times cover and see it as a send-up of the safe, homely image that had won her so many fans. Then again, as she had told several journalists in her last interviews, at 37 she was comfortable in her own skin. She could take risks with her image and win, and on a personal level she had found happiness.

How utterly painful then for her fiance to hear the news of her murder in a telephone call and for her brother, Nigel, to read a newsflash on Sky News.

Just why she was murdered and by whom is a question of intense scrutiny. Was she the victim of her own celebrity, stalked by a lone nut? Or was it a professional "hit", paid for by one of he criminals she and Nick Ross helped put in prison as a result of Crimewatch? And now, with the introduction of a possible Serbian reprisal into this whole sorry story, the speculation is set to run and run.

From all the tributes paid to Jill Dando this week, the words of her co-presenter, Nick Ross, stand out as a reminder of how she touched the lives of her friends and family: "She was, if anything, better, nicer, more modest, dignified, cleverer than anybody saw on the screen. She was a real star."