Emily Newton Dunn has just returned from a filming assignment, where she’s had to don the apparently rather sweaty costume of a professional Elvis impersonator. But the stale and oppressive scent of men is on the agenda in more ways than one. Because we’re in the Glasgow offices of Ideal World Productions, the TV company responsible for Bits, Britain’s first full-network terrestrial videogames television show in almost three years. When Bits first launched onto our screens, it caused a bit of a stir by having the programme presented by three women, a move decried as naïve by some and cynical by others. After all, if you believe games magazines’ readership figures, gaming is still a 97%-male pastime in the UK – what the heck could a bunch of silly girlies know about it?

The wave of sneering sexism which greeted Bits clearly still rankles with the Ideal World team, seven months and 24 shows later - the subject crops up unbidden over and over again during the course of a two-hour interview with the three presenters (there’s another Emily, the relatively TV-experienced Emily Booth having replaced East German model Claudia Trimde during series 2, and token loud American Aleks Krotoski). Despite producer Aldo Palumbo’s assertion that the girls have become "super-super-super confident" over the course of the two series shown so far (Channel 4 extended the 12-show commission to 24 two-thirds of the way through the initial run, and ran the two series together without a break in between), there’s still a highly defensive resentment in the air whenever the subject arises.

But then, that’s hardly surprising. After all, this is still an industry where the biggest part played by women is to act as stand decoration at ECTS and have drunken software executives stare down their cleavage for the weekend, and the reaction to the Bits girls in many quarters has barely been any more evolved. Not a day goes by, they say, without someone accusing them of being autocue bimbos who don’t play their own games and don’t write their own reviews. (Which I can confirm from sitting in on a Channel 4 chat forum after the show one night, where hundreds of viewers queued up to ask those very questions.)

"Blokes are very possessive about it," says Newton Dunn. "There’s a whole macho, competitive thing going on. But if you ask anyone who’s ever worked on a hotline, you’ll find there’s a far greater proportion of female gamers than anyone’s aware of. If a girl discovers games for herself, she WILL play them. There are a lot more girl gamers out there than you think, and a lot of women who would game more if there wasn’t the macho bollocks wank attached to it, some of it which we’ve encountered doing the show. There are a lot of people out there who don’t think we know what we’re talking about, they don’t think we play our own games, don’t write our scripts, just read off an autocue, all that stuff. But I think it’s changing now, more people now respect that we do our own stuff."

"I never think of myself as a presenter OR a girl when I’m in front of the camera," says Aleks Krotoski. Not, it should be added, even slightly defensively.

But anyway. While the obsessive focus on gender from industry and viewers alike weighs understandably on the presenters’ minds, of course, it has only served to deflect attention from the show itself. Which is a shame, because it’s a damn fine show, as can be seen from the viewing figures – a high of around half a million for a show going out at 1am and beyond is pretty good going, and more importantly represents an audience share of around 15% ("Higher than Brookside!", says Krotoski, although to be fair, have you seen Brookside recently?) In fact, one of the odd things about Bits’ success is that Channel 4 seem to be delighted with it (hence the very swift commissioning of series 2, and the further commissioning of another two series starting next April), but haven’t seen fit to give it a slightly more mainstream slot. Indeed, the second series suffered from being taken off screen for a momentum-sapping month slap bang in the middle of the second series.

"Channel 4 suddenly realised it was coming to the end of 1999," says Emily Newton Dunn, "and they hadn’t done enough foreign-language programmes, so we had the choice of either going on at about 4.30 in the morning, or being put back for a month while they put on ("South African underwater basket weaving", suggests Krotoski)... Czechoslovakian cricket or something."

"That whole Channel 4 minority viewing thing was coming from the heart after all," Emily Booth explains.

Ideal World elected for the break, reasoning that that would take them almost up to Christmas and provide an opportunity to get some of the year’s big games in, but there’s another mystery – with the games business still so overwhelmingly centred around December, surely the series couldn’t have ended at a worse time? The team glosses over the situation, ("I’m looking forward to a rest", says Aldo Palumbo diplomatically), but it seems like the decision of people who don’t really know anything about how the games business works. On this, Palumbo agrees.

"A lot of people in a position of power are one step behind gaming, I don’t think they understand that it’s about to turn a corner. Channel 4 are very up to date with the whole Internet culture, they’re doing a lot to get their presence much more evolved and interactive, but I don’t think they realise how much gaming will be a part of that. A lot of the future of Bits will depend on the response to the special [there’s a half-hour Tomb Raider 4 special going out in a teatime slot just after Christmas – "We had to say "boobs" instead of "tits", and I had to edit out the word ‘Christ’", sighs Palumbo], and I think that’ll be a very good response. It’s far too early to know what’ll happen with scheduling, we’re just absolutely dying for April to come around so we can get started again."

And after such a great reception, does the producer plan to mess with the winning formula?

"One thing I would like to do differently is spend less time doing shit games. Much as I think it’s cool to really slam things, it becomes a bit of a downer after a while if you spend three minutes talking about how shite a game is. Next year’s going to be weird, because there’s going to always be the temptation to look at Playstation 2 and do lots and lots of previews. The footage of that is so watchable, it’s awful to be sitting in the edit suite and cutting in old stuff – we were like that when the Dreamcast came out, I was wishing we could be running that exclusively and not the manky old Playstation stuff we had to do at the same time."

Keen viewers can only hope that the show’s strengths – the extended in-game footage and the no-punches-pulled reviews - don’t get lost in a torrent of glamorous PS2 previews of limited relevance to ordinary gamers who won’t have the machine until Christmas 2000. But it seems unlikely, since it’s just that mainstream market Ideal World are aware of and hoping to capture. (Assuming, for a minute, that that audience is still up at 1am.)

"There are a lot of new people who’ve bought into Playstation as the lifestyle-choice kind of thing," says Newton Dunn, "who’ll buy Playstation 2 because it has a DVD drive as a total home entertainment system. It’s opening up things to a whole set of entirely different people, the kind of people who’ll just switch off if you start banging on about "RTSes" and stuff. Gaming is broadening its appeal, and I think we personify that."

"Even though we ARE just a bunch of girls," she very noticeably doesn’t go on to add.

Whatever happens to Bits next year, your correspondent hopes there’ll still be time for classic moments like this, the entire transcript of a racing-game review from the last series which I now carry with me in my pocket at all times:

"This is the ultimate way to keep you from succumbing to that special little condition called Road Rage. Take the country's favourite motorway, fill it with cars and scatter your garage-fresh macaroni cheese all over your lap. But no more - out comes M25 Racer, where you can wreak total revenge. If YOU'RE ready to chew metal, get yourself some casualties on the way home from the shops tomorrow. Definitely one for the handhelds."