Rachel Jackson on CHUNKS & her Bunny Boiler vlogs

An unstoppable force, Rachel Jackson is going places in a literal sense as well as in her career: "I'm in a taxi," she says, as she's whisked away to an afternoon's filming. Over the phone and in the back of a cab, Jackson is natural and breezy in conversation – she mentions the buildings she can see out the window – though she becomes focussed when we get onto comedy and performance. With her current schedule there's a lot to talk about.

Her live show arrives at Glasgow Comedy Festival in March – it's no accident and an apt description that it is titled Force of Nature – but right now she is the face of Valentine's Day for BBC Three.

Her 2015 Fringe show, Memoirs of a Bunny Boiler, inspired a mini-series of six vlogs for the channel, with Jackson in persona as the cheerful but intense Cassandra. As Cassandra makes a foray into online dating she wonders if she should be on a more exclusive site than Tinder, while also recounting stories like how she seductively nibbled her dentist's fingers.

"I do like to toy with people," says Jackson. "I think there are some people who think it's a real vlog. I like to tread that line of surreal and normal."

The Edinburgh show ran for 45 minutes each day on the Free Fringe and could have gone completely undetected amid thousands of shows. "When you're at these little venues you think nobody is coming to see you," she says. "It was eight months later that BBC Three got in touch and said they'd seen the show in Edinburgh."

She's no stranger to the screen with her background as a trained actor, but she has enough comedy credentials to shake off any cynical tar from the 'actor tries comedy' brush. Separate to the vlog, Jackson won a place on Fast and Funny – an initiative between BBC Writersroom and BBC Scotland – for emerging comedic writers. Then, she's also part of the insurrection that is the comedy collective Chunks: "I feel like I'm in a family, it's amazing and we're a bunch of freaks. I try to go as often as I can because you just get to try anything."

At Chunks, each act is allotted only a short burst of stage time and there's barely a pause, giving the regular Glasgow night the pace of a Catherine Wheel and an immunity to the drag of a sketch that doesn't fly. "When something doesn't work it becomes part of the joke. It's a night where anything can happen and there's no judgement."

Another of Jackson's characters, Janight, had a first live run-out at Chunks. Developed with fellow comedian Susan Riddell, Janight has found love of a different kind to Cassandra: an obsession for Nicola Sturgeon.

"I had an ex-boyfriend who worked in the kitchens at the Scottish Parliament," says Jackson, "and he thought he was this big shot rubbing shoulders with politicians. I thought it'd be funny to have somebody who really loved Nicola Sturgeon while serving the burgers at lunchtime.

"Then Susan – who is a great comedy writer and who I met at Fast and Funny – fell in love with the character and we wrote the web series.

"People say play to your strengths and I've always been an obsessive person, in that I like it to be extreme and put myself in the thick of it. I don't want to pigeonhole myself but it is good to do what you know and develop that way sometimes."

It's a theme that looks set to continue beyond the vlog and Glasgow Comedy Festival. Jackson is contemplating plans for the Edinburgh Fringe in which she'll lift the lid on her time as the face of Irn-Bru. "It was in 2011," she says. "At the time it was a job, but a funny one to tell people about. I was in an advert and they used my face on the bottles and buses. I'm still developing the idea but I'm thinking of playing a character that can't let go of the 'dizzying heights of the Irn-Bru times!'"