Is slapstick Saturday-night TV as we know it facing extinction? After Dec was left flying solo without Ant last Saturday night, and following the rise of midweek hits such as The Great British Bake-off, which has claimed the most-watched crown, viewers could be forgiven for thinking so.

Enter Laura Jackson, one of a new roster of stars that BBC1 is banking on to breathe new life into the profitable 6pm slot with its new prime-time show, Ready or Not. “In the current climate of what’s going on in the world, it’s just nice to watch a bit of telly and have a bit of escapism,” says the 31-year-old Huddersfield-born presenter.

Ready or Not, which she describes as The Generation Game meets You’ve Been Framed, takes the form of a roaming quiz show, with Jackson as one of its main hosts, “Quiztina”, alongside a diverse lineup including 28-year-old newcomer London Hughes. It’s just the tonic TV needs – on and off the camera.

She is professionally diplomatic about McPartlin’s absence. “It’s sometimes a shame that everyone is so bothered about what’s going on in people’s private lives. We love Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway because it makes us belly laugh one minute and could have us in tears the next. I think we still want to see something that’s light-hearted and brings the whole family together.”

Having young, straight-talking personalities such as Jackson on our screens will inevitably help address the more serious problems engulfing the television industry, such as the gender pay gap, which the BBC has been under fire for recently.

After being in a situation where she was paid half the wage of a male co-star “who had the same profile, who did the same hours and who did the same job as me”, Jackson says she feels empowered to demand her fair share, as well as help young TV stars such as herself disrupt the register of familiar faces.

“Breaking through is so hard now. There are not the [training-ground] platforms there once were – MTV, T4, kids morning shows,” she says. “I absolutely love watching Holly and Fearn and Davina, but there hasn’t been any new, younger talent come up through the TV system for a while. It’s hard to change the landscape, but by the BBC being a bit riskier with talent, let’s hope they start a trend. With a new director of programming at Channel 4 too, talk of change and an appetite for newer talent it feels like change is in the air.”

In many ways, Jackson represents the changing role of celebrity itself. Her TV career, which she kickstarted 10 years ago after getting spotted working on the reception of private members club Shoreditch House, reads like prime-time prep school. It began with Channel 4’s Freshly Squeezed alongside Nick Grimshaw and gained momentum with stints on Take Me Out, The Gossip, This Morning, The Clothes Show and Celebrity Big Brother’s Little Brother. But her soaring popularity is the result of less mainstream projects, which affords her that enviable status of being cool-crowd approved, similar to that of Alexa Chung with whom she is frequently compared.

The supper club that she established around her kitchen table in 2013 with Radio 1 DJ Alice Levine has since grown into a lifestyle brand, producing an acclaimed cookbook, a homeware collaboration with Habitat, global ambassadorships from Nespresso and food-editor titles at Marie Claire magazine. Her girl-next-door sense of style puts her on the front row of London Fashion Week’s biggest shows and has led to a collaboration with one of the most coveted contemporary fashion brands, Rixo London. And, because of her keen eye for interiors and willingness to share on Instagram the trials and tribulations of refurbishing her new house in east London she shares with her fashion-photographer husband Jon Corrigan, she has built a loyal following of nearly 64,000, making her a micro-influencer.

“In England we love to box-tick when you’re filling out a form – we’re so bothered about what we do, not who are you,” she says. “I don’t want to be defined by one job that I do. I have my fingers in lots of different pies, but I’m passionate about doing all of them and it’s great for my brain to be doing a lot of different things. I think now there’s such cross-pollination between hobbies and business and life that they all bleed into each other.”

She is, in her own words, a polymath, albeit one with none of the ego usually associated with such a moniker. Or to put it simply, by refusing to restrict herself to one career she’s relatable to a millennial audience, with all the charm that delights 61-year-olds (the average age of the BBC viewer). Reliability is a character trait frequently attributed to our friends in the north. “Being northern, I always want to be relatable and I always want to be likeable. That’s who we are isn’t it?” she says, citing “fun and frolicking” shows such as The Big Breakfast, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and TFI Friday, fronted by fellow northerner Chris Evans, as her TV favourites growing up.

Levine says of her business partner: “Being a TV presenter is such a crazy, weird, exciting job, and sometimes that doesn’t translate when you watch a host on television. People can be too earnest and robot perfect, too afraid to make a little mistake, but Laura feels real and exudes a love for it that makes you want to go along for the ride whatever journey she’s on. It’s a dynamism that is mercurial and so hard to fake.”

They are traits that have made greats out of many a star before her and which the BBC will be hoping attracts coveted audience figures too. As Jackson says: “People have to be at the heart of it.”