In rehearsals, says Kym Johnson, Tom Williams would drive himself and get “a bit moody” when he couldn’t master a step. Childhood friend Tom Sherington concurs: “If something doesn’t work out, he can be the stroppiest prick around.” Williams admits there is a long-standing pattern: he would throw his tools in the workshop if he had a bad day. What does he think about these moods? “It’s a terrible quality, and I’m ashamed of it."

Tom Williams opens his apartment door wearing only a white towel, displaying that famous televisual torso. It’s 9am and the tall, muscled king of the prime-time dancefloor has dashed from the shower to answer the buzzer. “Sorry, mate,” he calls from the doorway. “I’ll be out in two minutes.”

After he's pulled himself together, he appears in the backyard. There’s a big empty tree pot on the back veranda, and a cosy garden that bespeaks an owner often absent, rather than his past life as a carpenter who got his TV start on the DIY show Room for Improvement. Williams’s neighbours watched with curiosity recently when he laboriously replaced the lattice on the veranda with more contemporary treated pine slats. “I’m not as fast on the tools anymore,” he admits. It’s time he borrowed his neighbour’s mower to tidy up the lawn, he says. The last owner planted the lavender, hydrangeas and frangipani, it turns out.

He's not keen on hanging around at home but a glimpse inside the apartment reveals a small, neat kitchen, a couple of well-loved sofas and shelves of books - travel journalism from India and France, as you might expect from a roving TV reporter, snuggled against titles on rock bands such as You Am I and Silverchair. He doesn’t go much for fiction: a copy of Moby Dick is somewhere on the shelf, partly read.

He jumps onto his black, chopper-style bicycle, which has huge vertical handlebars - the sort of bike you’d expect to see a boisterous teenager riding. There’s a small cartoon of a human skull on the centre bar. The 34-year-old is wearing gold frame Ray-Bans, blue jeans and an old white T-shirt stretched with age, with one or two holes around the neck, under a black cotton jacket. In large red signature lettering across his pectorals, atop a cartoon character eating a vinyl record, the T-shirt reads: Delicious.

Life is very delicious these days for Tom the everyman handyman who brought his ladies’ man act to prime time. Just over two years ago, he was Tom the chippie, earning $25 an hour renovating homes and fixing fences. Today, he’s tapped a nostalgic public penchant for old-fashioned romance, jiving away with the inaugural crown as viewers’ favourite leading man on second series of Seven’s Dancing with the Stars – and scooping up in his strong arms a new girlfriend, dancing partner Kym Johnson, 28. All this while still flitting around the world sending back travelogues for The Great Outdoors. Now he has his own show, hosting the fifth series of The Mole.

Surely over-exposure of that now familiar square jaw and torso, covered or not, awaits? “Over-exposure is something the audience is going to have to consider,” says Williams, who renews his licence as a carpenter every three years, just in case the media circus lights dim. If the rollercoaster TV career ended tomorrow, he says, he’d probably take up a full-time radio career. But right now, he says with a shrug, “they like me.” (Although last month, unhappy Mole fans started an online petition to lobby Seven to bring back the show's original host, Grant Bowler.)

Williams chats and slowly cycles along the footpath to his neighbourhood café in Harbord, a northern Sydney suburb overlooking Freshwater Beach, 10 minutes’ walk north of Manly via the streets of Queenscliff. The area is so effectively buffered by a mix of Edwardian and brick veneer houses and '50s and '60s apartment blocks that outsiders often don’t venture here. Harbord is situated in a little valley forgotten by the tourists, in stark contrast to neighbouring Manly. Already this morning, Williams has jogged to Manly, worked out with weights at the gym, and jogged back here. If he hadn't had this interview, he would have surfed.

His laconic, down-to-earth manner belies his intense pursuit of perfectionism in almost everything he does. When he rows, he "attacks the water". Other rowers, he speculates, might say, "He kind of goes a bit psychopathic". Shelley Craft, one of his Great Outdoors co-stars, recalls that in Aspen last year, Williams raced her snowboarding while she skied. "There was no more Mr Nice Guy then, that's for sure," she says, with a laugh. "Maybe you do have to play a little rough to win." Williams concedes: “I like the feeling that runs through your blood when you’re about to match up against somebody … It must be my primeval heritage, my Neanderthal life. Going out and taking the mammoth."

He was away on Great Outdoors assignments for 186 days last year, and has just returned from Kyoto, Japan, which included filming a segment on geishas. A sit-down tea in a private geisha house for an hour, he says, eyes agape, costs $980. “I’m not sold on this idea it’s not sexual, mate."

His best mate, builder Tom Sherington, is the same age and has known Williams since they grew up together in Sydney's Hunters Hill. The two Toms met when their mothers brought them to the same pre-school. They'd ride bikes and windsurf together, and later, at about 16, steal beer from the Williams family home to drink in the local park. “You mention his name, and what he’s done, and you can’t help but just giggle," says Sherington. "He always creates something out of nothing. He’s been kissed by the gods.”

In April, Williams and Kym Johnson burned up the screen in front of 2.3 million viewers nationally. They did the quick step, a jive and finally a freestyle dance in which Williams whipped off his shirt to the strains of Joe Cocker’s You Can Leave Your Hat On. A network star was born. “God, all the ladies love him,” says Johnson, who broke off her engagement to Queensland test cricketer Shane Watson earlier this year and whose relationship with Williams became public in mid-June. “Every woman was envious of me and the job I had. A lot of women in the street were saying, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky’.”

Their Dancing with the Stars rehearsals throughout summer and autumn were indeed hot; Williams says he would sweat so much he’d have to change T-shirts three times in a dancing session with Johnson. But Williams insists he and Johnson did not become an item until well after the series ended. Williams had been single and keen for a new romance. Was Johnson’s relationship with Watson over before he began dating her? “Of course,” says Williams.

The pair will not talk specifically about the relationship, beyond confirming their happiness. “It’s still very young,” says Williams. “It’s a very young relationship. It’s just so incredibly personal. The attention that it has received has affected everybody. It makes me terribly shy to talk about it.” He won’t say in what way the couple have been affected by the publicity. But that hasn’t stopped them going out publicly: Williams and Johnson were recently seen enjoying a You Am I concert together in Sydney. Johnson, a blonde professional dancer, says she’d rather not say anything about the relationship. “It’s just all new,” she says.

In rehearsals, says Johnson, Williams would drive himself and get “a bit moody” when he couldn’t master a step. “I’d get to know his moods and I’d say, ‘let’s take a break’.” Childhood friend Sherington concurs: “If something doesn’t work out, he can be the stroppiest prick around.” Williams admits there is a long-standing pattern: he would throw his tools in the workshop if he had a bad day on the building site. If he got wiped out at rowing, he would smash his oar. If learning to dance with Johnson went awry in rehearsals, he would stamp his foot, and if a performance went less than well, he would sulk – on air. “Then I wouldn’t talk when we were standing in front of [host] Daryl [Somers],” he says. “Kym would have to do all the talking.” What does he think about these moods? “It’s a terrible quality, and I’m ashamed of it."

Williams says Johnson wanted him to go shirtless at the start of the dancing series but he refused, arguing they needed to keep something in reserve. It had to be like a rock performance, he said - build the audience up into a frenzy, “then give it to them with everything you’ve got: balls to the wall, empty the tank.”

It's not only women who go ga-ga over his chiselled good looks - the former carpenter appeals as much to men as he does to women, says Johnson. “He’s a bloke you can go and have a beer with,” she says. Carpenter James Boyce, a friend of 11 years, agrees. “He’s got the general, blokey, Australian outlook.” And Tim Ross, of the NOVA FM duo Merrick and Rosso who launched Williams's media career five years ago on Radio Triple J as ‘”Tom the chippie from Manly” after he phoned in for an on-air chat from his ute, says Williams is “a sexy dance bomb”, but that “he doesn’t look down his nose at fat guys - which is good for me.”

“A lot of people would assume that he’s really not a nice guy, that there’s a dark side,” says Shelley Craft. “But there’s not. He really is Tom the chippie.”

Williams sips his takeaway double-shot latte – full cream – on a park bench overlooking Freshwater Beach. A dozen surfers are out on the water, lying on their boards. “Three-quarters of them are probably sitting around whinging about their wives,” Williams quips, barely concealing a longing look that says he’d love to be waiting for that wave right now. In summer, Williams surfs every day, first thing in the morning. He used to be a competitive rower, but work these days makes it hard to commit to a crew, though he still occasionally competes. Likewise, he remains a reserve member of the Palm Beach Surf Lifesaving Club. Five years ago, he used to do one patrol per month, but there’s no time for rescuing swimmers in distress with the prime time weight of a TV network already on his built shoulders.

Williams also loves rock and roll, says Rosso. He’s “sick for it”, for bands including Diamond Skin, Monster Magnet and Tool. “Fuckin’ oath,” confirms Williams. “It makes me tremble.” With a hint of mischief, Rosso suggests his media protégé has his shirts tailored to show off his physique. “I think he’s quite vain, but most guys are these days.” Williams the metrosexual seems only half true today: his hair is dishevelled, and there’s some stubble, though the teeth are beaming white in the winter sun and perfectly straight. The ladies’ man tag fits, though, insists Rosso. “You’d be a ladies’ man, too, if thousands of women had sent your shirtless image around the Internet.”

If Williams’s fan mail is anything to go by, there’s longevity in wide appeal. No-one has quantified the letters but it’s constant, says the network’s publicity department. The mother of an 11-year-old boy writes to say Williams is a role model to her son. A teenager pens a plea for career advice on becoming a travel reporter. A woman who professes to be shy writes: “I am tall, slim, with long brown hair and blue eyes.” She is not quite so shy: she includes her mobile phone number with a request that Williams SMS her some time. Tim Worner, Seven’s head of programming and production, says: “He has that pretty rare but very special combination – the female audience really like him, and blokes don’t think he’s a tosser.”

Kym Johnson has to compete with not only an adoring audience, but the other constant companion in Williams’s life: a one-year-old Burmese named Streaker, who wakes him each morning by jumping on him; a cat alarm clock. Streaker, Williams says, is well due to get his “balls chopped off”. “He’s still got a little more kick in him to go, but then it will all be over,” Williams confirms, laughing. Streaker’s wanderings indicate he “likes the ladies”. Well, you know what they say about tom cats.

In the recent past, Williams needed only catch up for lunch with a beautiful woman for the gossip columnists to suggest a romantic link. The star of Nine’s newly revived game show Temptation, Livinia Nixon, had coffee and nothing more with Williams on a date earlier this year, it turns out. Magazine editors figure among the real time paramours: Madison editor Paula Joye, for instance. “Paula Joye? How did you get that?” says Williams, smiling. “My god, that was years ago.” He doesn’t want to talk about ex-girlfriends. In 2003, he split with Cleo fashion editor Jo Ferguson, less than happily. Ferguson too declines to be drawn. “We broke up two years ago, and I’ve got a new boyfriend now,” she explains. “It was a time in our lives, and it’s not that time now.” Journalists, says Ferguson, “always print something I didn’t say.” Such as? “That I am in love with him, which is not true, and not fair.”

Friends and colleagues commonly call Williams a “ladies man”. Shelley Craft says: “Maybe he’s just very fussy – as he should be. He never settles for second best.” Williams’s circle of mates – about a dozen guys around his age from Hunters Hill, who call themselves The Fellas – get together for a beer every Christmas to chew over life. Williams, who turns 35 soon, hints at settling down like the rest of them. “It would be nice to carry on like Mick Jagger and live like that, but that’s not how it is,” he says.

Williams says he “massively, definitely” wants kids. With Kym? “To go into something like that is speaking way beyond where anyone is at,” he says. “I want to [have kids] as my own personal person, as being Tom. I’m not thinking about who I’m doing it with when I say that. It’s a general feeling that it’s a goal.” So no wedding bells yet? “No,” he says, clearly tired with intimate questions, but managing a resigned laugh. “No. No.”

Tom Williams, the youngest of three children to David and Helen Williams of Hunters Hill, adores his five nieces and nephews. Both his elder siblings have children. His brother, property salesman Mathew, 40, has two daughters, Charlotte, 3, and Georgia, 1. His sister, homemaker Caroline, 37, has two boys, Jack, 9, and Harry, 8, and a girl, Annabel, 1.

Tom, Mathew and Caroline themselves had a loving upbringing, but there was trouble in the marriage between their father David, a solicitor, and their mother, Helen, a nurse. They managed OK financially, sending their children to good schools, but, says Williams: “I could understand that both of them were struggling, and this wasn’t the best scene.” The couple separated in 1986, and later divorced.

Williams – born in Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital on October 16, 1970 – would spend the later teenage years with his mother during the week, and weekends with his father. Like three generations of Williams men before him, he attended St Aloysius College, a Jesuit-run school at Milsons Point on Sydney’s north shore, which challenges its all-male student population to be “men for others”. The school’s development director, Murray Happ, says Williams was a “bit of a rogue at school, a character. The fact he ended up on television doesn’t surprise anyone. But he certainly wasn’t a naughty boy.”

Williams admits to a “few instances of underage drinking” with friends at a Boomerang Beach caravan park on the NSW mid-north coast in his teens, when the proprietor would call police in, but he never had any formal trouble with the law. Williams concedes he wasn’t a “terribly over-academic kid”. He scored a C in virtually every subject. He even says he probably wasn’t a popular choice when named prefect in his final school year. Some students may have muttered he hadn’t achieved enough academically or on the sporting field, he speculates. He scrunches up his face and mimics what he imagined they said when he was called to the podium: ”Oh, not Williams!” But the sense here is that Williams, not others, is criticising his own efforts. Does Williams still call himself a Catholic? “Depends who’s asking,” he says, jokingly. “Of course, yeah.” But he is rarely in a church to “say g’day to God and stuff. Religion’s probably something I deal with in the water.”

Helen’s second marriage, to advertising executive Bill Fleming, was happier than her first, and gave Tom two much older step brothers and a step sister, to whom he has never been really close. Fleming encouraged Williams to finish his education and study accountancy and advertising. At 21, Williams joined advertising agency Mojo. He spent 18 unhappy months filing paperwork before he realised working in an office was not for him. He was rescued at 23 when surf lifesaving buddy and Manly carpenter James Boyce asked him to help build Boyce’s home extension, and Williams’s carpentry career began. Williams’s perfectionism was impressive, marked by initial impatience, says Boyce. “He’d get annoyed with himself if he stuffed anything up.”

In 1989, his father, David, a big smoker and drinker, was given four to five weeks to live. Cancer had spread throughout his body but he survived for six months. His youngest son spent a lot of time with the ailing 53-year-old, right up to the end. “For a young man, that was bloody tough,” says Williams, who was 19 at the time. “It took me many years to see my way through it.” He pauses and considers. “I have struggled with it since.”

In his late 20s, in 1996 and 1997, Williams spent a year “ski bumming” around North America, then a year travelling Indonesia and Europe. Stepfather Bill Fleming, meanwhile, began a slow decline with Parkinson’s disease, dying of complications in 2003, at age 71. Helen, who is 60-plus, is retired and lives at Mosman.

He's still very close to his mother. “My mum is the matriarch of the family,” says Williams. “My mum is the boss. She’s everybody’s support line if you’re down, or if you need a meal. If you’re crook, she’s the one to come down and make you chicken soup.” He pauses for a moment before dissolving into laughter. “Mate, my mum still does my washing.” Yes, Tom Williams drops off his washing basket at Mosman, every week.

In October 2003, Williams’s other best mate, Michael Cowdry, whom he met when they were both 16 at the Palm Beach Surf Lifesaving Club and with whom he spent several years house sharing, was killed in a car crash. As Cowdry lay in hospital, the dying man’s mother invited Williams to come into his room and sit by his bedside. “I couldn’t do it. At that point I knew some people can cop it and deal with it, and others can’t.” Three days later, Cowdry died.

"He was gutted," recalls Tom Sherington. The normally gregarious TV star craved the company of friends and family more than ever. “I think it put a lot of things into perspective for Tom. It really just brought home to Tom the importance of relationships.”

Perhaps loss has also shaped him. “Mike used to always say, ‘Live every day like it’s your last, because, one day, you’re bound to be right’. I always tacked onto it, ‘and live with no regrets’.” Williams holds his latte and continues looking down at the surfers lying hopefully in the waters. “I don’t want to be a punter. I want to be known as someone who’s giving it everything he’s got.”