Nigella is recipe for success

She is credited with having made cookery sexy.

Now Nigella Lawson is to spice up the daytime television schedules with a deal to front her own chat show which could earn her £1million a year.

The 45-year- old mother of two will interview celebrity guests about food, cookery, make-up and parenting in the five-day-a-week show on ITV starting this summer.

After months of negotiations, the self-styled Domestic Goddess is poised to sign a £100,000, five-week contract to spearhead ITV's revamped daytime schedule - ending speculation that she was planning to move to America.

One executive called the show, which has yet to be given a precise time slot, 'a more serious platform to showcase Nigella's obvious talents'.

Depending on whether it is a ratings success when it begins in early June, Miss Lawson will then be offered a £20,000-perweek open-ended contract to continue with it indefinitely.

She is one of a group of female presenters the channel is bringing in to 'sex up' its summer schedules. Carol Smillie, Gaby Roslin and Gabby Logan are among others.

Miss Lawson's new programme ends a two-year absence from the screen following the death from cancer of her first husband, the writer John Diamond, and her subsequent-marriage to Charles Saatchi, the modern art collector and advertising guru.

But the change of direction also appears to underline the celebrity chef's determination to find a new challenge amid signs that the public is falling out of love with her culinary skills.

Her last series - Forever Summer - drew an average audience of fewer than one million on Channel 4 in 2003, compared with the five million who watched Jamie's School Dinners.

A friend said: 'Before she was a TV cook Nigella wrote a topical current affairs column for a national newspaper. She is extremely opinionated and very intelligent. She's no onetrick pony.'