Next Monday at 5pm Natasha Kaplinsky makes television history. As presenter of the relaunched and renamed Five News with Natasha Kaplinsky – having the presenter’s name in the title is another dubious first for the British news bulletin – she becomes the first British newsreader to earn a million pounds a year.

“Well, isn’t that awful if that’s the case?” she says, stricken, when I meet her on her first day at the grim industrial estate where Sky News makes the bulletin. “The money side of things I’ve always found very uncomfortable. Chris [Shaw, Five’s Head of News] would probably hate me for saying this, but if they’d halved the money I probably still would have done the job. It absolutely wasn’t the money.”

Kaplinsky reasonably points out that she married an investment banker two and a half years ago so meeting the mortgage on their home in Fulham was not exactly a struggle even on her salary as co-presenter of the BBC’s Six O’Clock News. She certainly did not go back to the BBC and ask for more money to stay. “Money is not a big thing in our family. It never has been,” she says, and I note that although, when heavily made up for the screen she has that sheen of wealth, today, in her black poloneck and a black and silver cardy, she looks classy but far from killer glam. The reason that I believe her protestations about the money not mattering is that her parents seem to be the least materialistic people ever, and no daughter, it is said, has ever been closer to her family.

Her mother, Catherine, a psychotherapist, displeased her wealthy family by choosing to marry Raphie Kaplinsky a left-wing South African academic who fled the apartheid regime in 1969 the day before he was likely to be arrested. He is now an economics professor at the Open University and her “hero”.

Yet Natasha married a banker? “I married him in spite of the fact he was a banker rather than because of the fact he’s a banker.”

So maybe the new job flatters her ego, I suggest: it is not just the news; it is the news with Natasha. “Again, that sounds like a massive ego trip. That was not part of it, either. I didn’t even know that was part of the offer when it came and I feel a bit embarrassed about that too. Not just that, but it also puts a bit more pressure on me, you know, News with Natasha Kaplinsky. I’ve moved from a channel where I could touch six, seven, eight million people a night doing the Six or the Ten O’Clock News to a channel that is a relative minnow in the industry. It can’t be about wanting fame, can it?”

I am not sure even she quite knows why she has made the move. She took plenty of advice beforehand, including that of former presenter of Five News Kirsty Young, who now presentsCrimewatch, a gig that many thought she was a shoo-in for. I suspect she hopes that presenting a more informal, upbeat news programme every week night will allow her to synthesise the two halves of her career: newshound on one side, light-entertainment goddess on the other. The “Spangles” nickname she earned after winning Strictly Come Dancing three years ago, which she hates, might even begin to fade. “I don’t think I’ll be out in my sequins on a Saturday night again and I certainly won’t be dancing any more.”

Naively, she does not even seem to understand why Five wants her so much, although I can guess. From next week, this unique personification of showbusiness and journalism becomes the face of the channel. That is why they will pay her a million this year (a bit less after that, I understand) and why she will soon be on billboards across the nation. She is “horrified” about that too. “They showed me some images and asked which did I prefer and I said, ‘You know what? I should not be in this meeting because I hate everything and I think looking at pictures of yourself is just vile’.”

We have, then, in Kaplinsky a paradox: either an introvert performer or a star massively deluded about her motivations. I try a piece of pop psychology on her. Perhaps she wears so much make-up on air to hide from us. It is her armour plating.

“Do I wear too much make-up?” I think so, yes. “Well, then I’ll wear less.”

Her hair will keep its expensive coiffure, however. “I’ve got very, very, very curly, ridiculously unmanageable hair. Big hair. My husband says it’s fantastic. He says it’s like sleeping with two different women. You go to bed with someone with straight-out hair and you wake up with someone with curly hair.”

For her first decade in TV journalism her rise was fast but not phenomenal: From cable TV to Meridian ITV as a reporter then presenter, then London Tonight and Sky News. She became co-presenter with Dermot Murnaghan of BBC Breakfast in 2002, a job she did for three and a half years before the early rises finally got her down and the BBC promoted her to theSix O’Clockspot, where it was assumed she would stay.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010