To understand the phenomenon that is Jennifer Ellison, you would need to take it right back to her childhood, when 17 years ago the pretty young toddler perched upon the counter of a Liverpool chip shop and declared her future plans for world domination. "Hello!" she bellowed, "My name's Jennifer Ellison and one day I'm going to be famous!" She was 2 years old at the time. Funnily enough, she was right.

As fate would have it, her future agent was stood in the queue. She has been with her ever since. Jennifer throughout her childhood was a dedicated student to the arts and performed in various productions and sang in various concerts. She became a classically trained ballet dancer, which later in her teens secured her a place in the English National Ballet -which she had to put on hold - because by then, her career had catapulted her into a different direction - television.

Jennifer first wrote to the producers of Brookside when she was 9, asking if her home team's soap treasure would like to see her, maybe to audition her for any parts they had coming up. Her mum still keeps the polite rejection letter framed on the living room wall. She knew too that it was only a matter of time before Jennifer would be clasped to the nation's bosom. Since, at age fourteen, she took the starring role of Emily Shadwick in the same said soap and subsequently dominated the Brookside skyline with her own inimitable charm. Emily's loves, losses, heartbreaks and mischiefs with her erstwhile paramour, Tinhead captivated the nation from the moment she entered. Her first contract lasted precisely six episodes. But she stayed in the show for five years, just enough time to secure her a full time post as Merseyside's official sweetheart. However, she had decided that she wanted to go back to her first loves - singing and dancing.

Which is where we meet her now in her new record company, surrounded by a heap of fan mail. The Mersey TV press office used to have two piles in their in-tray: Brookside fan mail and Jennifer Ellison fan mail.