IT IS appropriate, if slightly mortifying, that my first face-to-face chat with Shed Media head Eileen Gallagher takes place in what I'd thought were the men's toilets of frappé-and-frippery merchants Fifi and Ally.

Unisex toilets may discomfort this reporter, but it is this kind of metrosexual flourish that Gallagher - the Hamilton-born television producer behind Footballers' Wives, Waterloo Road and Bad Girls - would now like to capture on the small screen.

The 48-year-old chief executive of the production company says her "big ambition" is to produce a "contemporary drama about 30-somethings in Glasgow, showing the side of Scotland that people from outside the country never get to see".

"Stories from Scotland usually feature people either shooting grouse or shooting up but I want to show Glasgow and Edinburgh in all their glory," she says, hinting heavily that her company may be about to announce just such a commission.

Although she doesn't make the comparison herself, you immediately imagine 1990s favourite and era-defining drama This Life, with the bright lights of the one-time second city of the empire replacing its metropolitan equivalents.

Gallagher's career is somewhat neon-lit itself. After training in journalism in Cardiff, she joined STV as a press officer in 1984, taking less than a decade to rise to the rank of director of broadcasting. Senior posts at Granada and LWT followed until 10 years ago, when Gallagher left her day job to set up Shed with colleagues Brian Park, Ann McManus (both fellow Scots) and Maureen Chadwick. Last week, the company - which floated on the Alternative Investment Market three years ago - announced a 52% rise in pre-tax profits from £2.5 million to £3.8m for the first six months of the year.

The company is set to open its first Scottish office in Glasgow, and its much-hyped commission for new BBC Scotland drama Hope Springs - billed as "Northern Exposure with a delicious twist of Shed" - is one of the key business wins behind the healthy margin. Another is the sale of already developed formats such as parenting masterclass Supernanny into the US market and the recent acquisitions of fellow indies Wall to Wall and Twenty Twenty. But it is not so much the money, but the programmes themselves that have kept Gallagher in the spotlight. Hope Springs is one of the most hotly anticipated programmes to be made in Scotland in years.

While network television production north of the Border languishes in the doldrums, Shed's tale of four female jewel thieves holed up in a Highland village is being talked about as the first twinkling of new dawn for TV in Scotland, an attitude only bolstered by Gallagher's talk of the "cultural importance" of a healthy home-grown broadcasting sector.

However, the programme hasn't even finished shooting (Gallagher laughs that the non-stop rain has had to be edited out) and there are no guarantees of success ahead. Although Shed has an enviable track record, its last much-hyped network show Rock Rivals - a TV parody seen on launch last winter as the lynchpin of ITV's drama schedule - failed to capture either the public or the critics' imagination. The show was unable on its first night to attract more viewers (3.9m) than a far less glossy show about traffic cops on BBC One (4.1m).

So, with reputation, share price - even national pride - at stake does Gallagher worry Hope Springs could turn out to be a stinker?

"I'm nervous about any programme launch, especially the bigger and high-profile ones. You can never tell what an audience's reaction is going to be."

She doesn't seem the nervous type. Despite her broadcasting background, her script is 100% business-speak: programmes are "brands", and the loss of Footballers' Wives and Bad Girls in 2006 - a big blow that would have pulled many companies under - was simply a "challenge" that led to a new rule that no single programme would ever again constitute more than 20% of the company's income, a point she drives home with a well positioned pie chart or 10.

Her confidence, in Scotland at least, could also be explained by her relationship with BBC Scotland head of drama Anne Mensah. Mensah is said to consider Shed one of the key channels through which the corporation will meet its promises to spend more money on network production in Scotland. Gallagher herself has become more and more established within the Scottish broadcasting firmament, working with Glasgow Caledonian University on the creation of a new television writing course.

Although Shed's biggest hits once appeared on ITV, Gallagher is quick to state that is no longer the case. The BBC and Channel 4 are now the company's two main UK customers, which might explain why the failure of Rock Rivals is shuffled into the beleaguered commercial broadcaster's court "It wasn't even sampled - people didn't want a show so close to a programme they already watched The X Factor. I was surprised ITV even commissioned it, we presented them with a few ideas - it was trying to do things it had never done before. Peter Fincham ITV's director of television is now going for dramas that are not so youthful or celebrity-driven, things that will appeal to the wider audience."

The opposite of Rock Rivals then? Gallagher just smiles. On axing Shed staples Bad Girls and Footballers' Wives, ITV chairman Michael Grade was reported to have said the shows "should have been killed before they died". However, Gallagher says part of Shed's recent success rests on the sale of the Bad Girls format to US TV giant HBO.

She doesn't even try to restrain her glee: "Hah! Yes, I've ribbed Michael about that. He denies he even said it."

Although the figures are heading in the right direction for Shed, Gallagher is less optimistic about the UK television market, saying it is "time for tin hats." She is far happier talking through the appetite for UK TV in the US. A new series of Who Do You Think You Are? will air across the pond in January. Think the family history format that made Newsnight terrier Jeremy Paxman cry and add a healthy dash of Hollywood pizazz. "Yes there's a A-list star but I'm not telling you who it is," she teases.

This, she says proudly, is the way Scottish producers should be thinking: "Television produces great jobs and it is healthy culturally for the native Scots to see high-quality programmes made in Scotland and exported into the US. We have made a mark in the US and now we want to make a mark with the content from our Scottish business."

And if that involves glamorous encounters in the unisex toilets of an unexpectedly (for the audience outside Scotland that is) metrosexual Glasgow, then so be it.