Viv Hardwick chats to opera star Lesley Garrett about approaching her 50th birthday after her most successful year yet as a TV performer and her stage tour ambitions for 2005.

SHE may only be the coalminer's great-great granddaughter, but top soprano Lesley Garrett has dominated British TV in 2004 with a string of ground-breaking performances. From the ratings successes of BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing and BBC2's Who Do You Think You Are?, she enjoyed the end of the year with three singing performances of her own show, the opera The Little Prince and a tongue-in-cheek appearance as Mother Superior in Graham Norton's tribute to The Sound Of Music.

Now there's the small hurdle of celebrating her 50th birthday on April 10.

"Small hurdle, it's more like a bloody great Beecher's Brook. I'm having a massive party and I'm going to be fabulous at 50. I'll also be out in Australia on my first tour there so I've got everything to celebrate," says the singer who feared at 49 that her career might be slowing down. But now there's talk of her doing more spin-off musical documentaries after the tales of the skeletons in her family's closet struck a chord with viewers.

Garrett says: "The last year with the BBC has been incredible. To have been a founder member of programmes like Strictly Come Dancing and Who Do You Think You Are? doesn't happen very often.

"Both were equally fascinating. The dancing was the hardest work but the best fun I've ever had and a blast from start to finish. Who Do You Think You Are? was quite disturbing in its way, to find out fascinating things about one's family. It took my breath away at times.

"I'd written an autobiography which was the start of the story but I only knew little bits. I think what was great about the series was that it encouraged the general public to do what we were all doing in researching more about our families. I think it's useful to know what we are so that we can move on. It's quite a coincidence this all happened in my 49th year because I can start my 50th year with this fabulous clean slate." In Garrett's case there was great, great-grandad Charlie, a parish councillor from Thorne, South Yorkshire, who 'accidentally' gave his wife a fatal dose of carbolic acid.

"This is the kind of stuff that films are made of. I was lucky to have such fabulous people in my background from a programme-maker's point of view. In fact there were some pieces we left out that were worse," says the performer who laughs about revealing more.

"I'll tell you one thing. Charlie's youngest son, Arthur, who would have been my great-uncle, died when he was 11 of what was called lockjaw in those days but we know these days as tetanus. Apparently he accidentally hammered a nail through his face, but don't ask me how that happened."

Her own family is so used to her doing what she describes as mad projects that the variety of TV performances showed "exactly what I'm about". In fact on March 20, she's due to be seen in a BBC project about the waltz king, Johann Strauss and his son, which was filmed in Vienna and features the Viennese Waltz plus Garrett's TV dance partner Anton Du Beke. "The biggest joke on the planet was me playing Mother Superior in the Sound Of Music special where I was wearing a very sexy red frock," laughs Garrett who originally agreed to do Strictly Come Dancing at the rate of five hours dance rehearsal a week.

"That was a lie, basically, a joke. The organisers got a little confused between what the professionals could do and what the amateurs could be expected to do. They had talked about us doing social dancing which you could learn in five hours quite easily, but we were doing exhibition dancing at the highest level eventually and choreography which required hours and hours of practice. "Aled Jones and I both lost huge amounts of weight. He lost two-and-a-half stone and I lost two stone and between us we think we lost a total equal to his partner Lilia."

Added to all this was a sell-out opening week concert at Gateshead's The Sage Music Centre in January and the news that all tickets went months ago for a follow-up performance last night at the same venue.

Garrett is baffled that tonight's concert of Mozart and Handel works plus Jonathan Dove's new composition at Middlesbrough Town Hall has plenty of tickets still available.

"I'm a bit curious to know why seats are proving so difficult to sell particularly when it's the first time I've appeared in Middlesbrough for many year," she says.

Garrett's main concern is on ensuring that her orchestra partners, the Sage-based Northern Sinfonia - who she regards as the UK's most fabulous orchestra - continue to be seen by as many people as possible in the region.

The singer endorses the opinion that The Sage is now the country's best acoustic performance space in Britain and jokes: "I have to say when I was last there in January they were still finishing off the dressing rooms but I have been promised I'll have my diva facilities this time."

In the next year, Garrett aims to increase her stage appearances as well as becoming the friendly face of classical music on TV. So after Australia is a UK tour of The Merry Widow where Strictly Come Dancing has helped enormously because now it's an all singing, all dancing display for Britain's best-loved opera star.

* Lesley Garrett is at Middlesbrough Town Hall tonight at 7.45pm. Tickets: (01642) 729792.

Published: 27/01/2005