RUBY WAX - the lippy, outrageous American buttoned up Britons usually love to hate - finally made the leap to mass market star status in Britain during 1996. By sheer force of personality, Wax has performed the TV equivalent of willing water to run uphill.
First came the Imelda Marcos interview in which Ruby Wax not only gained access to her legendary store of shoes but persuaded the dead dictator's wife, in all her self deluded finery, to perform the song, Feelings, to a piano accompaniment. It was a coup that won Wax huge critical respect from her peers and led straight to her being named BBC 1's top female entertainer in the British Comedy Awards.
Then, in November, that feat was itself capped by Wax's extraordinary performance with Fergie, an event that became an overnight television sensation and was accorded that rare accolade by the BBC - an instant repeat. What can erase the final humiliation of Fergie, locked out of her own house, peering through the hall window, or the revelation that the Duchess has colour coded drawers, to help her locate her knickers?
Meanwhile, her zany shopaholic adverts for the Vauxhall Corsa, with the up to the minute message of smart girls on top, helped drag in the ITV audiences, making Ruby Wax the complete household name.
Wax (43) has achieved what few thought possible 15 years ago, when the Chicago born ball of neurotic energy, only child of a self made, Jewish, sausage skin manufacturer and his house proud wife, first hit British screens with some over the top performances that fellow professionals now brand wilful.
Gone is the performer once consigned to BBC 2 and Channel 4 as too wacky for the mainstream. The ratings triumphs - 14.8 million for Fergie - are brandished like badges of honour. She has worked hard for them but audiences have also had years to acclimatise themselves to the funny, clever woman lurking beneath the loud, aggressive exterior.
Her executive producer, the shrewd Jon Plowman, who also brought to the screen Absolutely Fabulous (which Wax script edited), describes listening to two middle aged cleaners talking about Wax on the train home from Greenwich, south east London, shortly after the Marcos interview. "I realised then that something had happened during 1996," he says.
HE first met her in the 1970s when she was a struggling actress and says she has changed very little: "She's always a very lively lady." For example, after a memorable quarrel with her boyfriend of the time, Mel Smith, she flung all his clothes on to the doorstep. But in the past eight years she has found personal stability through marriage (her third) and three small children, with her former BBC producer husband, Ed Bye.
Friends who have met Wax's parents, now retired in Florida, say they understand the drive to succeed on which she runs. Their reaction to the Fergie interview would be: "Why aren't you doing the Queen of England?"
As efforts to revive the chat show format wither, one by one, Ruby Wax is suddenly being acknowledged by the professionals who pull TV strings as the woman who has reinvented the format of getting alongside the rich and famous, but - unlike Hello! magazine, in which she has gleefully appeared as a cover story - coming away with something revelatory.
For the launch of the new series, attended by Wax, the BBC compiled a tape of juicy bits from the interviews. Watching it, you realise how Wax's range extends way beyond the trademark manic. Sharon Stone, who kicks off the series and is persuaded to change from pyjamas to Hasidic Jewish disguise for a trip to a local coffee bar, visibly rises to meet her questions, explaining that her star status makes it hard to find a man. A relaxed Helen Mirren walks arm in arm with Wax through wintry New York streets and says she is ready to stop working: "I'm sick of the ambition." Wax's antidote is to dash into K Mart with her for some bargain shopping.
In a revealing aside in a curiously dull encounter with Roseanne star John Goodman, who clearly loathes her style, he remarks that he'd been on Wogan and he's a fabulous man. Wax raps back: "He's over; I'm his replacement." She's not joking.
As the tape ended, a small, slim woman in a plum coloured trouser suit walked to a chair in front of the small audience, without fuss. "Hi, thanks for watching," said a subdued Ruby Wax in a small voice, tired eyes well hidden behind dark glasses. Nothing about her in the flesh is as large as the screen persona. Even the black curly hair looked well behaved.
There was silence. "Look, they're shy," she joked, breaking the ice. On television, Wax acts out her part of interviewer with inventiveness. Filming lasts hours - Imelda Marcos took three days - and the best bits are ruthlessly pulled out in an editing process in which she is involved. Wax has no interest in conducting live interviews. "Too boring," she says.
This ability to improvise and to join in, chameleon like, sets her apart from all the other practitioners, including America's legendary Barbara Walters. (Her ambivalent stance is little understood in her home territory: she is emphatically not a star in the US.)
In the new series, for example, she asks Baywatch's Pamela Anderson which is her favourite (love making) position. This leads to a hilarious burlesque in the back seat of a taxi, verging on the tasteless, in which Wax acts out sex with a totally unembarrassed Anderson - the position has Wax on top, facing away from her partner, alternately whooping in disbelief that it can be done at all and worrying about squashing those famously reconstructed breasts. Was Wax embarrassed by the sequence? "Not when I think that we might get nine million viewers. It takes the pain right out of it," she quips.
A Wax performance always contains energy and a willingness to look daft. She is clearly exhausting to be around. Before the Fergie interview, she prepared intensively, badgering researchers, obsessively, for more cuttings, in top investigative journalist mode.
Her secret, she freely confesses, is to keep her subjects moving and energetic: "Just sitting still, people solidify." And then there is the simple fact that she has pull: stars attract stars. Imelda Marcos, for example, had been shown Hello! magazine's cover story on Wax: this was an international currency she instantly thought she understood.
Wax is the co star in the interviews and a common strand in them is a visible attempt to hold back, a fear she might dominate. "I never dry up. My version of drying up isn't silence, not talking. My talking is like muzak. I go on and on, hoping to land somewhere," she says. She has a mastery of the comic one liner: as script editor of Ab Fab, she was valued for solving problems with instant pay off lines.
Not everyone rises to her level of intelligence and repartee, however. Several of the interviews in the series are clearly unrewarding. "Jane Seymour was like a steel wall. She is tough," Wax says.
The key question now is what will she do next? Absolutely Fabulous has ended. Even America has a finite number of stars willing to be Waxed. But the BBC is making greater fuss of her than ever. There is election fever in the wind and while Wax says politicians are not in her sights, there is a tantalising hint that she might try to take the format forward by tackling Norma Major and other political wives - imagine her walking around Islington with Cherie Blair. Ruby Wax, at the height of her fame, has no intention of resting on her butt.