A distant figure looms into view across the windswept sands of Watergate Bay in Cornwall. The closer the figure gets, the more familiar his features appear, a mug you could pick out from a lineup of a thousand.

Jason Donovan is back, and playing the prodigal son Daniel Marrack in ITV’s new series, Echo Beach. How apt. He smiles. “There are certainly some parallels here between me and the character.”

Later in his trailer, parked in a blowy, beachfront car park, Donovan warms to the theme.

“I guess, for me, coming back into a high-profile TV drama is like returning to my roots. And that feels good. Like Daniel, I’ve been away, done some growing up and come back.” But, unlike Daniel, who left Echo Beach in disgrace, Donovan himself is not looking to be clasped back to the public bosom.

“My days of really worrying about what people say or think about me are over,” he says. “You like me. Perfect. You hate me, or feel the need to criticise me, that’s perfect, too. At least you’re talking about me. So who cares? In the end, you know, at least I’m not dead.”

To understand the latter statement we need to rewind a bit. In the 1980s, during Neighbours, “The Kylie Years”, he played Minogue’s boyfriend Scott Robinson, the boy next door whose picture graced the walls of a million girls’ bedrooms.

After leaving the show, he was a pop prince who signed with Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and sold 30 million records worldwide before donning a loincloth and sandals to star in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

All was looking good in Donovan world... until he rashly sued The Face magazine in 1992 over unfounded allegations that he was gay. He won £200,000 in damages, but alienated the media and lost the support of a huge gay following. His work and personal life went into a tailspin.

With his career in the doldrums, Donovan retreated into a drug habit that had started with the occasional “spliff”, but spiralled into full-blown cocaine addiction.

“Cocaine just seemed to make life easier,” he says. “It became my way of dealing with every problem. Phone calls, things are stacking up? Have a line of coke. Clean the house? It’s easy on coke.

“In the end, though, it gets to a point where having to punctuate your day with cocaine is just boring and you start to feel as though you could use a good wash. But leaving it behind is tougher than you think.

“In all honesty, it’s probably taken me most of the past six years to get the drugs thing out of my system. But now I do feel that I’ve hit a level where I’ve wanted to be for a very long time.”

It’s for this reason that Donovan recently published his autobiography, Between the Lines (every pun intended). In the book and now, in conversation, he cites his eight-year relationship with his former stage manager Angela Malloch, plus becoming a father to their two children, Jemma, 7, and Zac, 6, as key to his salvation.

“I have had the love, not just of a strong woman, but of someone who was prepared to let me fall in love with my own life again. And when I met her I was ready for it.

“Then the kids came along and your perspective shifts again. I knew that to be the kind of father and human being that I wanted to be there was baggage to be got rid of.”

Personal redemption has come hand-in-hand with professional reinvention. And Donovan thanks his participation in the 2006 series of I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! for the latter.

“To be honest, making the decision to take part was far harder than taking part itself. As it turned out it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life and it helped to represent me to the public. When I came out the perception of me was not the same as when I went in.”

He has a point. A new generation of fans warmed to him while the now older generation who had first loved him as Scott Robinson, fell in love with him all over again; nostalgia, perhaps, but rather like Take That or the Spice Girls, Donovan found that he was suddenly cool again. He was offered new career opportunities and gained credibility in the 2006 UK tours of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and David Eldridge’s Festen. To say nothing of Echo Beach itself.

The show will run in tandem with the comedy series, Moving Wallpaper, which is set behind the scenes of Echo Beach itself. The cast of the latter – including Donovan himself – are usually the butt of the former’s jokes. And while each can be watched separately, if watched together Moving Wallpaper gives an ironic undertow to Echo Beach.

“But, you know, that’s one of the things that I love about the whole idea,” says Donovan. “It feels hugely fresh and innovative and I couldn’t care less if jokes are made at my expense. You have to have a sense of humour about yourself – if my experiences have taught me anything it’s that.”

“My life now,” he says, “is not defined by fame or success or by the number of times I’m mentioned in newspapers; If, in fact, it ever was. What I have discovered is that neither fame nor success is the key to happiness, it’s the other way round entirely.”

Whatever the onslaught of attention, it’s unlikely anyway, he says, to rival either the Jason-mania he experienced on Neighbours or the post-Face magazine backlash. “For me it’s like having eaten a vindaloo and now considering a korma. It doesn’t scare me at all.”

Moving Wallpaper/Echo Beach, Thur, ITV1, 9pm/9.30pm. See Caitlin Moran, page 4

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