Elle Mc Feast made a mistake, was shunned and thrown out of the ABC family, but is back a changed woman. The tragic princess. The huntress hunted. The queen who was not to be. Libbi Gorr has just been to England to try to understand Diana, and she's coming back knowing quite a lot about herself.

It's been a whole year since Gorr's infamous creation, Elle McFeast, has been seen on our television screens. Just two years before that, McFeast was on her way to being the reigning Australian monarch whose guerilla interview tactics had served her so well on Andrew Denton's "Live and Sweaty" and her own award winning specials that the ABC actually dumped stalwarts Roy Slaven and HG Nelson from its schedule in order to accomodate McFeast with her very own big budget chat show.

But the title "McFeast Live" turned out to be unfortunate. The show nearly left the character dead. And fittingly, it was nororious murderer Mark "Chopper" Read who caused her newar demise. On the very first episode of the series, in March 1988, McFeast invited the killer - who was drunk, for good measure - to chat about killing and chuckled alongside him as he described feeding a man into a cement mixer.

The outrage was immediate. Ratings nosedived, booked guests suddenly found reasons they couldn't show up and after hobbling along for fewer than its planned 30 episodes, the ABC pulled the plug. Since then McFeast has managed only a couple more specials for the ABC before being telephoned in the middle of filming a third to be told that her life at Aunty was over.

After that, even Gorr thought McFeast was dead. After forming a production company with former ABC hcheief DAvid Hill the public was told early this year that Gorr had "moved on" from McFeast. But she's back. "This is the new life of Elle," says Gorr of her character's new venture at Ten, her first ever commercial outing. "This is the first big project since then. It's a brand new start."

Instrumental in breaking the television drought was Hill, who Gorr has known since her "Live and Sweaty" days, when he was managing the ABC. The first project of the production company - appropriately named Gorr Hill - was to send the new era Elle on a trip to London for a special about the monarchy called, "The Queen and I".

But Gorr cheerfully admits it's actually much more about Diana. Gorr is fascinated by the late princess and by the insights into Diana's psyche afforded by her own small experience as a woman hounded by the press and shunned by the institution which had once feted her as its gerat hope. "It's really wild, isn't it," she says of the similarities. "I mean, that whole notion of being a public celebrity, of sharing your whole self, fighting an emotional real war basically by being media content was a very dangerous thing to do."

However, if, unlike Diana, you do survive the journey, Gorr says it can make you a better person. "They're the sorts of things you learn from,." she says. "At the time when everything blows up you think 'Oh my god' - but now it's fine."

The newly fragile Gorr had her most dramatic "Diana moment" when, as McFeast, she arranged to have a riding lesson with the princess's much maligned lover, James Hewitt. "Quite frankly, if you have someone like that saying, 'No, give me your hands and let me show you how to hold the reins' and you're an insecure lonely young woman and someone was being that kind to you, you can perfectly understand what happened," she says.

The episode with Hewitt does not actually appear in "The Queen and I". He became a victim of the dreaded commercial hour. "We forgot about the ads," Gorr laughs. However, the episode will appear in a future McFeast Abroad adventure, which Ten is holding for the new ratings period next year. Next week's program does, however, feature interviews with both Diana's brother, Charles Spencer, and her mother, Grances Shand Kydd.

"It was bizarre," admits Gorr. She used McFeast's disingenuous Aussie girl persona to its full power in order to charm the family members into speaking to her when she encounted them at an open day at the Spencer family seat of Althorp, where Diana is buried. "To actually have a conversation with Diana's mothe," she says, "It's not something that you can get out of your head, when you're sitting down next to her and when she says 'Diana', she's talking about her own daughter, who's buried on that island over there. It was really...I hate to use the word 'demystifying', but it was one of those things that made something that was totally fairytale suddenly very human."

The idea of the special is to take a fresh look at the royal family in the post Diana age : to look at the royal family in the spirit of Diana. "The whole Diana thing humanised an inaccessible system," she says. "And that's what we're trying to do too." The McFeast who conducts the Spencer interviews - and others with royal insiders including Fredrick Fosx, the Queens milliner, and Ivor Spencer, who trains the royal household's butlers - is markedly different from the character on television last year.

This is backpacker Elle. An Elle who's escaped the confines of her own country and hit the world running, starting in London like all good expats. She even looks different : the hair is straightened and in pigtails, the lipstick is much less insistent. "And she wears her little Miss Australia T-shirt because she misses Australia," laughs Gorr. "But it's better that she's in London, I imagine. Because this way I can have a life as well.