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That plain-looking men distrust (trans: are fiendishly envious of) pretty boys is no great mystery, nor the fact that this distrust is doubly compounded when the pretty boy is also hugely successful. That envy is adequately dealt with, however, by the irrefutable knowledge that pretty boys grow up into pudgy-faced blokes with thinning hair, and that their careers will collapse along with their looks.

Damn Rob Lowe's impertinent hide, then, for resurfacing some 16 years after "St Elmo's Fire", looking disgustingly handsome and healthy (at 37, he'd easily pass for a man ten years younger) and for having the sheer gall to be enjoying something of a career peak with his role as Sam Seaborn in America's finest television export to date, The West Wing.

There's more than a hint of postmodern disorientation to our meeting on the West Wing set. Tucked away in a quiet corner of the Warner Studio Lot in Burbank, LA, just around the corner from a chunk of Chicago occupied by the ER crew, lies a meticulously exact recreation of Washington's White House offices. And - despite the blazing Californian glare outside - the filming schedules dictate that we are currently gearing up to Christmas, so it's fir-cones and cinnamon sticks a go go in a place where reality and make-believe have long since become virtually indistinguishable. Accordingly, it's necessary to lean forward just to ascertain that Lowe's eyes - the very clearest, Caribbean sea-blue - are not receiving some outside help of the contact lens ilk. "Er, no," he smiles, bumbling slightly, "they're real. They're just very blue - what can I do?"

Damn, damn, damn. No matter how well-honed your inner jealous-git may be, it's impossible not to be charmed by Lowe. It helps, of course, that the man has survived that most humbling of all experiences, the "Public Screw-up". As a 21 year-old thrown into the sweetshop of fame (and this was "80s fame", remember, well before Hollywood's current vogue for just saying No - publicly, at least - had become the norm), Lowe was quick to gorge himself on everything on offer. The result? A well-documented flirtation with drugs and alcohol, and some equally well-studied flirtations with the opposite sex (Princess Stephanie of Monaco and Natassja Kinski, among others) pretty much eclipsed anything that Rob Lowe was getting up to onscreen...

...until 1988, when one of Lowe's least-impressive performances was caught on film (even the Internet movie Database rates it a lowly four out of ten). The self-directed, self-starring "Rob Lowe Sex Video" was the result of one-night's misjudged abandon, when Lowe filmed himself in an Atlanta hotel-room lust-triangle, one of the two other participants being a distinctly illegal (under US law) 16-year-old. Oh, and - life being the most unforgiving purveyor of irony - this all took place while Lowe was attending a Democratic Convention.

The irony being, of course, that in the wake of that particular video-nasty, Lowe pretty much disappeared (a few blink-and-miss it appearances in Waynes World and Austin Powers aside) from our screens. Until earlier this year when Democrat Presidential Staff-Member, Sam Seaborn walked into The West Wing and found himself immediately at the centre of a potentially ruinous sex-scandal after "accidentally" sleeping with a call-girl. It's hard to avoid making comparisons.

"That particular plot-line was in the pilot," smiles Lowe, remarkably good-natured for someone who's spent the best part of his working life trying to forget the incident, "and at that point, they didn't even know I'd be in the show, so I didn't take it personally. The only thing that I insisted on was that when Sam found out that she was a prostitute that from then on their relationship would be platonic. I think in the spirit of this show, the characters wouldn't let anything stand in their way in their service to the president."

Good answer, and a tricky point dealt with nicely. But the fact remains that this question will surface in some shape or form in every West Wing-related interview that Lowe ever does. Faced with that inevitability, he shrugs, smiles again, and performs that very American gesture where two upturned palms simply translate as 'What can you do about it?' He's laughing, though. "Oh you know, it's fine. Really. What makes it even easier, actually, is that when you see the episodes, they're great. I love the stuff with Lori [the aforementioned call-girl]. When you get to our Christmas episode, that one's a doozy. That storyline just ended up working out really well."

Equally, Lowe had no worries that his character would end up permanently drawing on the less illustrious chapters of his own life, even if initially, at least, the public might see it that way. "I think at the beginning people were asking 'What is Rob Lowe's character going to be in this show? Is it going to be like Charlie Sheen on Spin City where they just basically have him play himself and all his personal issues are exploited for the benefit of the audience?' And while it may have looked like that for the first two episodes of West Wing, I think we avoided it pretty well."

If Lowe keeps coming back to the show, it's not the diversionary tactic you might assume. There's something bordering on the evangelical about his passion for West Wing, an accusation he's happy to plead guilty to. "I read the pilot-script when it was sent to me, and - without wanting to be over-dramatic about it - I really felt that everything I had done in my life had led me to being the guy to play this part." The blue eyes are positively electric now, as he recalls his own stint (in the capacity of celebrity vote-magnet) on the electoral trail. "I mean, I'd travelled with the candidates, I'd been there when they were going through the bullet points, I'd talked with them while they were having their make-up done." Er, "make-up"? "Yes!" he grins. "I remember being stunned the first time I saw a presidential candidate having make-up put on, and not to go on television, but just to walk down the street. I was staggered. So I'd been in that world, and this script so captured it."

The imminent airing of West Wing Season 2, in fact, shows how Lowe's character, Sam, was originally lured into the political arena (the first episode takes the form of a beautiful mass-flashback, with all the characters' respective pasts laid bare for the viewer). And much like his character, Rob Lowe is - in so many ways - a changed man these days. Now a 37 year-old happily married father of two, and with eleven years of sobriety under his belt, there's little to connect him with his BratPack Tabloid past. Ask him if he worries that the move from Big- to small-screen might be perceived as a retrograde step, and you're left feeling rather foolish for asking the question. "Most people agree that the movie/TV path is a two-way one these days, but I'd even take it a step further. With all respect to my film brothers, I'd say the writing on television is at this point far superior to the writing in movies. I mean, look at Charlie's Angels for example. Now you look at the way they treated the writers on that movie: bring em in, chuck em out, we'll take a word from you, throw that against the wall, cut and paste a bit here, and... And people just don't get credit in that arena. In television, and particularly here, writers are treated the way they should be."

He's not wrong of course: The West Wing won nine emmys in its first year alone (Friends, by way of comparison, has taken seven years to earn just three), and Lowe has no doubt that an intrinsically American show can appeal to a UK audience as much as to its home-grown devotees. "If you look at the highest-selling covers of People Magazine, it's always the Royal Family," he points out. "And that's not a british magazine. The Whitehouse is our Royal Family, effectively, and I think that kind of stuff translates across borders. I mean, remember watching Upstairs Downstairs as a child and that was a whole world I knew nothing about, but it was a great show. I loved it."

Our time up, he offers his own theory as to the extraordinary success of The West Wing: "You know what? It's wish-fulfillment. It's what we wish it was like. I mean the truth of the matter is that the Kennedy administration was not like Camelot, but Americans would like to think it was - it's nothing more than wish-fulfillment, and we just can't get enough of that." ...

Links:

• Red - http://www.emapmagazines.co.uk/
• The West Wing (NBC)
• thewestwing.co.uk