And it's also hard to know beyond all doubt if Lauren is really as childlike as she seems. When our photoshoot was over and everyone was preparing to leave the studio, Lauren asked if anyone knew where she had left her sunglasses, while they were quite clearly sitting on the top of her head. Genuine blonde moment? Practised icebreaker? Painfully embarrassing attempt at giving some depth to her character? It is impossible to tell.
Maybe it's all part of Lauren's masterplan to recapture the fleeting fame that, as of November 2005, peaked with an infamous series of appearances on the long-disappeared Wogan chatshow in the late 80s and early 90s.
If that doesn't ring any bells it might help you to know that when she appeared on BBC chat show Wogan, Lauren was James; a precocious, some would say obnoxious, 10-year-old entrepreneur and alleged antiques expert.
The one-dimensional explanation for his fame was that he could wow the audiences with an incredible knowledge of antiques far beyond his years. Look again and you can clearly see the curly blond hair and bow ties were mere accessories to the real joke: a pompous child that looked like Harpo Marx and sounded like a despicable young Tory.
It's hard to overstate just how much people disliked that child. As well as just being an annoying brat, the timing was appalling. The ruthless entrepreneurial instincts of the boy were at odds with a country that within two years would riot over Tory greed. Arrogant, unflinchingly rude, voicing a thinly veiled loathing of the working class in a monotone that set your teeth on edge, there was more than an whiff of Margaret Thatcher about young James. He was the child everyone wanted to slap. And when Frank Skinner admitted he would have liked to do just that, the Wogan audience applauded. According to Lauren's mother, someone even took it a step further and approached James in the street in Cardiff, held a knife to his throat and threatened to kill him.
But over time the attitude of the general public mellowed (if not that of the Cardiff locals whose hatred of Lauren means she regularly has to don disguises when she leaves the house to ensure her safety), in no small part helped by Lauren admitting she knew little to nothing about antiques and relied on prompts and stock answers to give the impression she did.
Public sympathy increased after James announced he wanted to be a woman. In 2001 he became Lauren, and some trashy/daytime TV slots followed as she veered dangerously close to becoming a one-woman freakshow. But she had bigger plans than that, plans she thought would be helped by agreeing to last year's Little Lady Fauntleroy, a Keith Allen-fronted documentary reintroducing the former child star to the greater public.
As it turned out, it wasn't the springboard she hoped it would be. She feels Allen abused her trust and admits embarrassment about saying she had a crush on him. "I liked him at first. It was a long time ago now. He was flirting with me all the time. Women love compliments and he was doing all that. I think at that particular time in my life, I think any man in trousers would have done," she offers in her defence.
GOING UNDERCOVER
As a vehicle for her talents, LLF was a hearse. She said she wanted to be a singer but appeared to be tone deaf. And by her own admission she looked terrible throughout. She now refers to the programme as 'it'.
"I've changed. I would never wear any of those clothes now. I was 14 stone in weight! I looked like Madonna gone wrong! I looked like Margaret Thatcher! I've changed since then," she explains. "Have I glammed it up? Well, yeah. That's what women do. Besides, what I look like is my security. It gives me the confidence to be who I am so I am not going to let myself go. I will never fail. I will always look good. I will always do everything I possibly can to succeed. And I also believe in doing lots of things," she says.
The 'do lots of things' philosophy saw Lauren fill part of her time away from the spotlight working for the family detective agency. Long story short? Wife is cheating on husband with another man. If hard evidence that the lover is a cad and a bounder can be shown to the woman she will surely leave him and cosy back up with her spouse. Lauren is dangled as bait for the randy philanderer. They kiss. The photo of that kiss drives the woman back to her husband. They all live happily ever after.
"Basically, it was just to get a tape of me and the wife's boyfriend kissing so our client, the husband, could show it to her and prove the lover was unfaithful and just a gigolo really, which is what he was," she explains, like she is being played at the wrong speed.
"My parents were on the other table with a microphone and I had one on my table, pretending to be a mobile phone, and I sat there and we waited. At this particular time I did drink quite a bit because it is quite a big thing.
"I was going to dress in something quite sexy but I was going through a Victoriany, sort of natural beautiful phase, without any cleavage and jeans."
Lauren explains they had spoken on the phone, the man wasn't bad looking, and she was nervous, but drew on her acting experience to get her through.
"Basically, the clincher was I had to kiss him on video and I was getting more and more drunk as time went by and also tired because of the journey. And he just kept saying, 'Why don't we go upstairs?' I said, 'Imagine me next time with black lingerie on, champagne on ice, in a hotel room,' because I always say the imagination is far stronger than the actual, you know, the actual action in the bedroom department," she continues. "But he still wanted something for his trouble, even though he was getting a free meal, and wine, which he ordered, which was about £30 a bottle, which I drank and he didn't because he wanted lagers," she says.
"We went around the corner, my parents were at the side and they must have been thinking, 'When are they going to get the shot now?!' and it was quite nice to flirt because I can flirt quite easily. I'm quite a flirtatious person. You can flirt but you must be careful. He didn't know anything was going on and when you are that drunk you can forget you are doing a detective job at all! Then I kissed him on the lips and we got that on camera and then I disappeared! And my parents thought I was in bed with him upstairs!
BELIEVE AND ACHIEVE
And was she? "I went into my hotel room and nothing happened, but a few things happened, but I just thought, 'Let's have some fun while we're doing the job!'" Quite what that means she doesn't say, and with her mother sitting just feet away it doesn't seem appropriate to demand an answer. Besides that, Lauren is off again, and being blonde. "That's what I am like when I want to be, you know. I'm very spontaneous, I can jump on a donkey," she says. "Don't you mean ride the donkey?" her mother corrects her. "Yes, ride the donkey," Lauren repeats.
Much has been made of the fact the Harries family is an insular unit. Perhaps too much so. Lauren admits her career, such as it is, takes up all her time. "I live for my career," she says. "That is what I live for. I don't really have a life. Not at the moment. But things change."
The much-alluded-to maternal influence that dictates Lauren's behaviour - and, it has been whispered, gender - doesn't seem to be that strong. A mother's influence is apparent only in that Lauren seems to have rejected most aspects of popular culture to spend time with her mother. She hasn't seen Bridget Jones's Diary. Lauren chooses "that woman from Knots Landing" as the person she would like to play her in the film of her life. Or "maybe Goldie Hawn". She says she likes Ronan Keating but calls him Ronan Keaton. What was the last film she saw? "I like true movies on Sky," she replies. The last CD she bought? "The only CDs I listen to are old sort of sounds. Boring! Romantic songs. Old 60s stuff." But books are a different matter. She loves to read. "Unfortunately, it's not unfortunate actually, I don't read fiction," she says. "I read all the Tibetan books about how to change your life," she says. To prove it, she delves into a black handbag with gold clasp and retrieves a copy of Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude by William Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill (the people who also brought you Believe And Achieve, The Success System That Never Fails, The Other Side Of The Mind, and Think And Grow Rich).
"Those are the sorts of books I read," she says. The book she read before that was The Magic Of Believing by Claude M Bristol. "You could feel very, very depressed. You read a book like that and they are gone then you have to get more books like that. You realise we are all here for a reason. You're here for a reason. We all are." And that reason is? "All I know is everything you go through in your life you are meant to be. The more positive you are in life, the better your life will be."
BOOK OF DREAMS
A significant part of this, for Lauren, is her personal scrapbook of positivity. It is a searing insight into Lauren the woman.
There are Chanel adverts; jewellery adverts. "It's very obsessional," she admits, flicking the pages to reveal pictures of Will Young ("I think he is lovely"), Jessica Simpson ("I didn't know who she was. It is the bottom. I look at other people's bodies and I make sure I look like theirs"), Christina Aguilera ("Because of the hair; I am growing my hair curlier"), Sharon Stone ("I like her watch"), and Richard and Judy ("Because we are planning on going on there"). Also in the book are cuttings of Big Brother 5 winner Nadia ("She represents transsexuals"), and Robbie Williams, whom she met briefly ("He's the only thing I have a weakness for. The first thing I saw when I woke up from the operation was flowers from him with a card saying, 'Well done, babe!'"). But as well as that there are pages filled with Lauren's repetitive scribbles of things she would like to happen. One page begs the phone to ring as it might bring an offer of work. Some pages are covered in handwritten positive-reinforcement phrases - "Think of yourself only as you want to be" / "I am" - scribbled over and over and over and over on the page. Why is the sum of £1,000 circled in blue biro at the bottom of one the pages? "I want £1,000," she replies, like it should be obvious.
"Have a scrapbook and put the things you want in it and visualise it and you will get it," she advises. "Why do you think I am here today? What you do is use your subconscious mind to focus on what you want. This works. I study metaphysics. I know all about it. It is all about the mind. It's a big word for lots of things. Metaphysics basically, the most important part of metaphysics, is the subconscious. I'm a bit of a white witch, knowing about lots of the subconscious," she says, before explaining that one of the reasons it is so important to be positive all the time is that the subconscious only has the mind of a 12-year-old. "It believes everything it is told," she says. "That is why sometimes you will say something like, 'I am such a jerk' and your subconscious won't think you are pretending and it will believe it. And then you will believe it and you will end up being a jerk," she explains, before wandering off on a highly libellous diversion.
Lauren's ultimate dream (other than to appear in Hello!), is the reason she has a picture of Davina McCall on her bedroom wall: to make an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. But what would transpire, I ask, if they they were to put her in a house with Keith Allen, Frank Skinner, a drawer full of knives and no escape?
"I wouldn't use the knives. I would just enjoy it. I would make their lives a living hell. You see, I do that. When I don't like somebody I can go into their brain and turn all the taps on so the water just floods out of their ears and their nose and their mouth. In the end they just go insane. I only do that in a mental way. And I would be a lady doing it," she smiles.
"And then there is always the sex thing as well. Just look sexy and that will help you," she says, before another libellous accusation about a household name probably having a sex doll with her face on it, and how she understands what made Ozzy Osbourne snort a line of ants.
"If somebody said in a magazine that ants gave you a certain reaction you would snort a line of them. You would, wouldn't you? To be honest with you, if you don't have anything in your cupboard, pills or anything, and you are used to them, you will try anything... from personal experience. I could have probably been convinced to snort a line of ants."
For once, it seems like Lauren isn't a televisual anachronism and her desperation and willingness to do anything could make her a star. Lauren in the jungle snorting ants? Don't bet against it.
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