A great whoop crashes through the hallway as audience members are led from the holding area onto the set for The Marilyn Denis Show. Jay O’Callaghan, the audience co-ordinator, casual in shorts and a headset, is challenging them to channel their inner fan. “Give us your best 16-year-old teen girl stuff!”

The set is on the east side of 299 Queen St. W., which is now called Bell Media Headquarters but is mostly familiar to Torontonians as the old CHUM-City Building.

The audience, overwhelmingly female with a few brave guys dotted in their midst, consists of groupings of friends, mothers and daughters, many of whom have travelled from across the country to be here. Everyone is dressed to impress, a sea of camera-friendly colour pops and on-trend florals. These ladies have been watching the fashion segments.

Monday marks the beginning of premiere week for the 10th season of The Marilyn Denis Show on CTV.

“It’s time to spread some big Marilyn Denis love!” yells O’Callaghan. That first roar was just practice.

Denis herself struts onto the set in a black pantsuit with pussy-bow blouse (also on-trend) to the yearning strains of the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket.”

The ovation belies the fact there are only 50 seats on the sound stage. This love is real and it needs no coaxing. Numbers bear this out: the show reaches 2.6 million viewers across the country from its 10 a.m. time slot on CTV, plus CTV2 and E! airings and streaming.

It would be hard to argue against the fact Marilyn is the hardest-working woman in Toronto showbiz. She famously rises every morning at 3:30 a.m. to chat and spin rock ’n’ roll on CHUM-FM’s morning show — now called Marilyn Denis and Jamar — a gig she has held steadily for 33 years. She runs down the hall after she hangs up her radio mic each morning, straight to the hair and makeup chair, and is on to the TV segment of her day.

Today’s show (which will air Wednesday) features effusive fashion expert Carson Kressley, a veteran of the first iteration of Queer Eye. There is a cooking segment: veggie-forward alternatives to pizza night starring quinoa and celebrity dietitian Abbey Sharp (the show has a rotating crew of fashion, decor and food experts).

This show is live-to-tape; some episodes are aired live, others assembled from pretaped segments. Indeed, production has tacked on a winter coat segment this morning with Kressley, to be aired later in the season. Both Kressley and Denis do telephone-booth quick changes and are back on set to introduce a makeover for a “superfan” from Haida Gwaii.

After a flurry of selfies with audience members, Denis does yet another quick change, this time into a denim shirt-dress with little white tennis shoes. First thing she points to in her office is a framed photo of her new husband, who was introduced to her viewers last Valentine’s Day. Denis has had a bang-up year.

“A woman in the audience today grabbed my hand and she said, ‘You give our demographic hope.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I fell in love at 58.’”

The new hubbie, Jim Helman, is an anesthesiologist from Seattle, who was in fact Denis’s junior high prom date back in the day, in Idaho. (Denis, now 61, was born in Edmonton but did college and her first radio job in Idaho.) Denis tells their meet-cute. Or rather their remeet.

“He got in touch with the show! Over Facebook! He was visiting family in Pittsburgh and waiting for his plane. He was thinking of friends from middle school and he looked me up. And he contacted the show. Good thing we answer all the viewer mail!”

Correspondence led to dinner, then a ring exchange last June. The family also grew with the arrival of Denis’s first grandchild. Her son, Adam Wylde, got married last January and the couple welcomed a baby girl in May. Mother and son are also peers. Wylde is co-host of the morning show on 99.9 Virgin Radio and has an office just down the hall from Denis.

“Every morning I say to him, ‘Have a good show, but don’t have a great show,’” says Denis. “Because we are direct competitors. I beat him in the ratings though.”

There were plenty of people, says Denis, who didn’t think The Marilyn Denis Show would make 10 seasons. She already had one long-running lifestyle show, logging 19 seasons at Cityline before a TV merger in 2008 brought an end to her hosting duties.

“Ten years is a benchmark,” she says. “And we should celebrate. The industry has changed; this is my second go-round of lifestyle.”

Of lightning striking twice, she says she dared people to doubt her. “People were saying, ‘I don’t know, this second show.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Don’t ever say don’t to me, because I’m gonna run with it. If I’m gonna make a mistake I’m gonna make a big one, not a small one.”

The Marilyn you hear on radio, and see on TV, is the same Marilyn sitting here in her office. She says you would meet the same Marilyn in line at the grocery store. “I’m not an actress. I don’t have a persona. This is it, this is me, because I don’t know how to do it any way else.”

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

She prefers working with an audience, she says, “because they feed me. They are so close to the stage they are part of it.” Furthermore, “I feel like I’m representing the audience on the TV side because I’m learning what the experts are sharing. If I don’t understand something I’m asking the questions the audience might ask.”

Her new radio co-host Jamar McNeil (as of last year, from shortly before her longtime hosting partner Roger Ashby retired), adds this observation about Denis, calling her a “genuine, kind and funny person. She listens, she’s thoughtful and she asks great questions. She also has a curiosity about things she might not be privy to or exposed to.”

Plus, he adds, “She’s also just a big kid! A good dance song, some mashed potatoes and a football game is all she needs to crack a smile. Who can’t get along with someone like that?”

Denis looks to her TV audience to see what is resonating so she knows if it will appeal to viewers at home. But as a storyteller, her radio experience — describing things you can’t see in front of you — is essential to her TV time slot. “Look, sometimes you gotta put a load of laundry in,” she says. “I have to make sure I’m telling enough of a story so they can follow what’s going on. You want them to come back. I’m very aware of that.”

Aging on air isn’t something that concerns Denis. “I can’t change my age. I don’t want to look like a young person because I’m not, so I dress appropriately. I do feel more seasoned, though, and more experienced and I’m grateful for that.” Denis and her stylist, Alexis Honce (who also does on-air segments), curate some 200 on-air looks per season.

They hew to classics and reuse things regularly. “Marilyn’s style has definitely evolved over the past 10 seasons,” says Honce, “but she has a consistent overall approach to fashion. Easy, accessible and current, without losing her own sense of style in the mix.”

This milestone season, Honce says she is “pushing her to wear more colour in the pieces she loves. Bright, bold coloured suits are new for her this season, which look great on her. She also has the best legs in the business so I definitely push her to wear more dresses and skirts.”

Relatability, that mysterious “it” quality that is the daytime talk show host’s stock-in-trade, is hard to define. Denis takes a stab at it: “It is about being honest, being real, having fun and being entertaining.”

If she does worry about anything, it is repeating herself. “I don’t want to be stale. There is a routine, yes. There are things we do that we know people like, things I’m known for, like bringing viewers on the show.” Those people make things interesting, she says. “That’s storytelling. Everyone has a story and they are all different. It’s the real in life that is resonant.”

So what keeps her going at this pace? “I feel good,” she says. “I get up in the morning and its early and that’s OK because I get to go to two jobs I love. I get to put in good time, learn something.” And by 11:30 a.m., “I feel like I’ve accomplished something.”

Denis got in early on a larger movement at play in media today. “We’ve always been inclusive,” she says, “though we are not political in any way.” Instead, “We are pro human beings, pro all ethnicities, pro you matter.”

Longevity matters to Denis, mostly in terms of her viewership. “I love that the multi-generations watch the show. Women come in with their daughters and granddaughters.”

And she is betting on reproduction to keep her place in Canadians’ hearts — because maternity leaves are a prime opportunity for her to gain fans. “As long as people are having babies,” she says, “my audience keeps evolving.”