HE'S THE cheeky chappie who has made Brummie tones acceptable on prime time television, a talented broadcaster whose lugubrious looks have become ubiquitous on our screens.
Yet Adrian Chiles has discovered a truth that so many celebrities endure: public success cannot buy you private happiness. Indeed, the former may well destroy the latter.
His beloved West Bromwich Albion are back in the Premiership, and his The On
e Show on BBC1 is a prime-time hit, so Chiles should be wreathed in smiles. But behind the deadpan expression and witty banter that have made Chiles a star, there has been considerable recent heartbreak.
Chiles and his wife of nearly 10 years, Radio 4 Woman's Hour presenter Jane Garvey, have split up after long being viewed as one of the media world's most stable couples. The break-up appears to be amicable, with their two daughters, Evelyn, eight, and Sian, five, staying at the couple's London home with their mother.
The parting has been blamed on Chiles's acknowledged workaholic tendencies, and, if the marriage is beyond saving, it will be particularly painful for a man who converted to Roman Catholicism last year.
According to Chiles's agent, no one else was involved in the split, but that has not stopped tabloids poring over his relationship with co-presenter Christine Bleakley. The glamorous Ulsterwoman is 14 years younger than Chiles, who in turn is three years younger than Garvey.
There have been reports of a growing friendship between the presenters after a sticky start – "she was a dippy, nice-looking bird from Northern Ireland and she thought I was a miserable old fart", said Chiles. They eventually "just clicked", he said, leading to articles describing the "sexual chemistry" between the pair, despite Bleakley's long-term relationship with a Belfast entrepreneur.
Chiles has been involved with a co-presenter once before – and it was the woman who would become his wife. The couple met when Garvey was the first voice heard on Five Live in 1994, and Chiles sat near her to read the business news. With Garvey tipped as a rising star in the corporation, Chiles was very much the junior partner. Now he is the £1m-a-year presenter and she has gone part-time with Woman's Hour to spend more hours with their children.
Their relationship also had a less than straightforward start, as Chiles – on the rebound from a broken engagement – sent Garvey an anonymous Valentine card, only for her to think it came from another man who she then dated for a time.
Eventually Garvey got together with the man she would marry, and for years the only thing that seemed to come between them was Chiles's absolute obsession with his home town team, West Brom, which he documented in his football memoirs We Don't Know What We're Doing.
Garvey, who survived the Southall rail crash in 1997 and famously reported live from the scene on her mobile phone, once said that "in promotion and relegation" ought to be inserted in the marriage vows. Her wedding present was a West Brom season ticket, and, when their first daughter was born, Chiles said on radio: "If she grows up to be a Chelsea fan, I'll disown her."
It is that blokey kind of humour that has made Chiles such a hit with the lad and ladette generation, though his success is baffling to those who think that only a pretty face can survive on television.
Perspicacity rather than pulchritude has seen him triumph in a profession that often prizes looks over wit. Yet life for the son of a Birmingham scaffolder and Croatian mother could have been entirely different.
After graduating in English Literature from the University of London, Chiles was twice interviewed for a job with MI5, but was eventually turned down. Broadcast's gain was the James Bond world's loss.
After studying journalism as a post-graduate at Cardiff University, Chiles had a brief spell with the News of the World as a sports reporter before joining the BBC, specialising in business. Working at first in radio, he graduated through the presenting ranks to host Radio 4's Financial World Tonight before hosting the successful BBC2 business programme Working Lunch, for which he won a Business Broadcaster of the Year award.
Chiles saw his pronounced yet polite Midlands accent as a strength because captains of industry would automatically mark him down intellectually. "I'd ask a couple of dumb questions then floor them with a third which showed I knew what I was talking about," he once said.
He was careful to keep a dual career, hosting his own Saturday sports show on Radio Five, while at the same time making documentaries for Panorama and one-off shows for BBC Television. But it was when the BBC created Match of the Day 2 on a Sunday night to accommodate football's increasingly flexible schedule that his career took off.
Passionate and funny about the sport, Chiles was chosen as the presenter and soon emerged as the people's champion, railing against the corporate takeover of the game and adopting a more cheery, informal approach than the Gary Lineker-presented sister show.
When the BBC wanted a host for You're Fired, the 'follow on' show to the hit series The Apprentice, they turned to former business news presenter Chiles, who gave the show an appealingly satirical yet sympathetic approach.
Earlier this year, Chiles found wider fame when he and footballer-turned-pundit Alan Shearer cycled from Newcastle to London to raise £371,065 for Sport Relief. "I don't know if you can have a transplant of the bones in your bum, but, if you can, I want one," was his comment.
Chiles's popularity saw ITV try to poach him with a three-year, £6m contract, but he stayed loyal to the BBC. This may be the only time he has ever said 'no' to anyone offering work, and his workload appears to be the real reason behind the break-up of his marriage.
The split took place before Euro 2008, when he was once again the best presenter in the BBC's coverage. The news was kept secret and Chiles never revealed the pressure of marital stress.
Two years ago, Chiles went back to his radio roots and the Midlands to present Life After Rover, a three-part Radio 4 documentary on the way people coped with the closure of the Longbridge car factory. It was moving, biting, elegiac and even funny at times – especially when Chiles interviewed a car worker called Mr Maurice Minor. If he ever decides to tone down his TV work, Chiles can comfortably return to his first broadcasting medium. After all, as he would be the first to agree, he has a great face for radio.
You've been googled • A year ago, Chiles was asked which sporting event he most wanted to cover and replied "the Olympics, because I like the challenge of getting to know a sport incredibly quickly". Next month he will get his wish as host of the BBC's breakfast coverage from Beijing.
• He had a cameo in the film Sex Lives Of The Potato Men, starring Johnny Vegas, inset, playing the role of 'sex party host'.
• The London Evening Standard's TV critic Victor Lewis-Smith is a fan, despite once writing that "Chiles is a man whose head has seemingly been prised into a bottle. I wonder about the wisdom of hiring a man who, even if he hadn't been in a car smash, would still have to be identified from his dental records."
• As an 11-year-old he fell off his bike and "sliced off my knackers" on the day of the FA Cup Final. "I had to go to hospital to have it all stitched back together… Only problem was all the neighbours kept coming round for a look, so I had to keep standing up mid-match and dropping my trousers," he revealed.
