Sparky, clever, yet daft enough to play dress-up in every one of her shows, Lucy Worsley is in serious danger of becoming a national treasure.

Her detractors – notably, grumpy David Starkey – accuse her of being populist but surely they’re only jealous. After all, how many other historians have their own Facebook fan page (The Lucy Worsley Appreciation Society, 2,355 ‘likes’ and counting..)?

As the impish presenter of programmes covering everything from historical toilets to the mistresses of Charles II, the 39-year-old has made history engaging, exciting and fun. If that means she’s a populist, well, good – she’s achieved her aim. Get them hooked on a juicy theme or personality and it might lead to reading a book on the topic. “Then they [she means us, viewers] start thinking about a university degree… before they know it, they’re doing primary research of their own and a new historian is born.” Really – Worsley would be the history lecturer the whole class has a crush on.

But don’t be too taken in by the Enid Blyton heartiness; she didn’t get where she is today on charm alone.

Born in Reading to a geologist father and web designer mother, a comprehensive education (her choice; she says she was, “an 11-year-old Marxist” and private education didn’t sit well with her communist principles) was followed by a stint at Oxford where she graduated with a first-class honours degree in ancient and modern history.

She then embarked on a DPhil in 17th-century architecture from the University of Sussex, a place she remembers fondly.

“Wonderful memories – apart from the very stressful time asbestos was discovered in the room where the colour photocopiers lived on the absolute last final day before I had to submit my thesis. Security guards tried to eject me from the building but I still went on frenziedly copying my illustrations.”

At 29, she became curator of Historic Royal Palaces, an appointment that’s all the more impressive considering she nearly didn’t find her way to the interview at St James’s Palace.

“I asked one of the bear-skinned guards in his sentry box where the entrance was but of course he wasn’t allowed to speak to me. Getting desperate, I finally begged him for a clue and he rolled his eyes in the direction in which I had to go.”

In 2011, she was given her own BBC Four TV series If Walls Could Talk, A History Of The Home, which she followed with Elegance And Decadence, The Age Of Regency (cue Worsley dressed as a foppish dandy) before last year’s fantastic Harlots, Housewives And Heroines, a three-part series on the lives of women after the Civil War. The last was particularly memorable for the part when a Samuel Pepys scholar describes the diarist meeting both Charles II’s queen and his current mistress and experiencing a spontaneous “emission” in his trousers. “I wasn’t expecting him to say that at all,” blushed Worsley.

She seems a natural at TV. “Any museum curator writes guidebooks, gives guided tours or talks,” she explains. “A TV programme seemed to take the same sort of thing to even more people.” Yet she’s famously shy – “I think that’s where the thing for dressing-up comes from – sometimes shy people can be the biggest show-offs” – and has sought speech therapy for the impediment which makes her pronounce ‘R’s as ‘W’s, apparently the result of “an enormously long tongue”. With a mind like hers, she must have appeared a dead cert for academia but it wasn’t a draw and she squirms when the BBC refers to her as “Dr Lucy Worsley” – “I worry about looking pretentious.”

It was never enough just to do the research, she says – she wanted to share her passions with others. “That’s why I chose to be a museum curator, where I come into contact with the thousands of people visiting historic places rather than an academic historian dealing just with students.”

Her latest tour builds on If Walls Could Talk (also a book), and sees Worsley take the audience on a domestic history lesson “from sauce-stirring to breast-feeding, teeth-cleaning to masturbation, getting dressed to getting married”.

One can just imagine the fusty professors shaking their heads in horror. But Worsley is unapologetic. “I’ve always been drawn to the nitty-gritty dirty detail of the past because I think that sometimes if you can discover what someone wore or how they washed, it can open up a window on to a completely different mental world. If you add up lots of details of the changes in the ways in which people thought about or looked after their homes or bodies you can then chart great, overarching revolutionary changes in society, in medicine, in gender relations and in religion.”

Meanwhile she is over-seeing the £12m restoration of Historic Royal Palaces, state apartments and gardens, as well as filming another TV series for BBC Four. It’s called A Very British Murder, which looks at the way the British started to take pleasure in reading about crime. So she’d consider herself ambitious I ask, somewhat unnecessarily? “I am insanely ambitious! Some people call me the ‘Evil Embryo’.”

It comes as no surprise when she names Elizabeth I as the historic figure with whom she feels most empathy: “Bold, clever, ambitious, indomitable and breaking new boundaries for her time and gender – good on her.”

Worsley is famously childless too, although she doesn’t mention this. Her comment that she had been “educated out of the natural reproductive function” in an interview last year made her the subject of numerous column inches and, unwittingly, a poster-girl for other women happily free of any maternal instincts.

While the media might have got worked up over Worsley’s comments, she took it all rather calmly, shrugging that she had deliberately decided “not to have it all” and that her decision meant she got to spend her time pursuing the work and projects she enjoys.

But she will admit to frustration at the increased scrutiny women face when compared with their male counterparts. Worsley is open about her appreciation of clothes – as a historian she has discovered there is “nothing trivial” about fashion and her fondness for dressing like a 1930s flapper is well documented. But as Home Secretary Theresa May discovered when she stepped out in leopard-print shoes and Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark has railed against, women are still judged on appearance regardless of their achievements.

“Clearly that’s wrong. The historians of the future will use this continuing obsession with women’s bodies as evidence to show that our society, however far we have come, is still very unequal.”

With that, she politely signs off – and the Lucy Worsley Appreciation Society gains a new member.