Rhona Cameron is in a period of flux, with a million plans she hasn’t yet realised. She says the difficulty is she can “do a lot of things”, which makes it harder to decide where to channel her energies.

After breaking into comedy in 1992 when she won So You Think You’re Funny?, the 43-year-old Scot has become a regular fixture on the stand-up circuit, the author of two books, a game show presenter, sitcom writer and reality TV star.

She has felt distanced from stand-up for some time, however, explaining: “I’m from the old-fashioned school of misanthropic, disturbed individuals that couldn’t do anything else, but now it’s big, big business. It’s a respectable profession. I don’t feel as in touch with it.”

Was writing an escape plan, then? She says it wasn’t a conscious decision, she just didn’t have time to pursue both strands of her career simultaneously. Ever the outsider, Cameron doesn’t feel much affinity with the literary world either.

“I’ve written one novel (The Naked Drinking Club) and a book (the autobiographical 1979: A Big Year In A Small Town) but I’m not a literary person. Books don’t really excite me. I don’t read very much. I’m only really happy when it’s an Irvine Welsh novel or Charles Bukowski, but as I’ve got older I can’t read Bukowski because it reminds me of my destructive younger days.”

She is ferociously proud of 1979, however, a poignant story of growing up gay in the very small Scottish town of Musselburgh. “1979 proved I could write,” she says. “It’s a very good book, I know it is. I was in an intense trance when I wrote it and it’s the only thing I’ve ever done that’s been universally critically acclaimed. I’m going to make it into a film hopefully... I really should be getting my arse into gear and writing the screenplay.”

She’s less proud of her appearances on reality TV shows, including I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here and Wife Swap (although massively beneficial to her public profile), explaining her decision to appear on the latter with the loaded statement: “Sometimes you do things for love, sometimes for money...I had 40,000 reasons to appear on it.”

Her “sometimes...” rant became a highlight of I’m A Celebrity, delivered at a point when the tensions of life in the jungle became too much for her. Wife Swap, in which she was paired with old-school comedian Stan Boardman passed off, surprisingly, more easily, although her girlfriend Suran Dickson didn’t fare as well with Stan’s wife Viv, who managed to silence a party with her comments about lesbians.

“I didn’t mind Stan – he was a silly old bloke sometimes, childish, but we had quite a laugh. The real story was with Suran and Viv and I think that was actually a very good storyline to have on TV,” says Cameron, who is a patron of both LGBT Youth Scotland and Pride London.

The show certainly didn’t do her real-life relationship any harm; Dickson proposed to her last year in Musselburgh, although they are in no hurry to set a date.

“We’ll get married whenever it’s right,” the terminally dour Cameron says. “We’ve just bought a flat, it’s my mum’s 80th – there’s no hurry.

I’ve lots of other things going on.”

* Cameron is a guest at this month’s edition of arts and media event The Space, where she and Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz will be interviewed by Briggy Smale. 7.30pm, £6/£4, 01273 687171