'Ere, it's that Coro slapper, innit?

Suranne Jones confesses that Steve off Coro Street is a good kisser. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Because Suranne Jones is so jolly nice I am going to take a leaf out of her book and not tell you the name of the senior editor who said: "Ask her if Steve's a good kisser".

Honestly, they are bonkers, those Coronation Street fans.

For those not in the know, Jones is the actor who plays a dizzy, aspirational slapper, the former knicker factory girl Karen McDonald who has just married Steve the kisser, again. And whose wedding was ruined by the announcement from psycho slapper Tracey Barlow that Steve had fathered her baby.

I was not going to ask Jones such silly questions, but honour-bound, I did ask her about Steve's kissing prowess, only to find out later that this is the question most often on people's lips. He is, by the way.

And Steve and Karen "have a great sex life. If they're not arguing they're [doing] the other".

We met Jones at the Hilton where she was holed up doing media and being very good, almost immediately getting in the plug for New Zealand TV Update, which brought her here.

Also at the hotel were a bunch of media folk who were supposed to be attending the launch of some new brand of tea. Pity the poor bloke attempting to flog the stuff - every time I looked up, I saw them ogling. Suranne Jones is always going to be more exciting than a cuppa.

Actually, she was having a cup of tea at the time - what a missed opportunity: you'd think the tea seller could have rushed over, given her a cup of his and got a picture.

She likes her cuppa, and she likes to put on her pyjamas when she's boozing ("I'm a comfortable drinker"). She has just moved back in with her parents and her mum puts a hottie in her bed every night. "And who wants to read about that? It's really boring."

She has learned not to "go to the places where they'll catch me falling out drunk as a skunk. If I want to have a good drink, like everybody else you'll find me on the floor of my boyfriend's house."

I think she would be excellent fun to get drunk with, which is not a thing you would say about most of Coro's characters, especially Gail.

The maddest thing she's ever read about herself is that "I managed to sleep with two guys in the space of half an hour" at an awards ceremony.

I think this is very impressive so I say, "Well done". She giggles and says, "Thank you very much. Yeah, that's good going."

A recent story had her dating four blokes at once. She says she was quite relieved to read that her real boyfriend, Jonathan Wrather, who played Joe on the Street, was one of them. "I'm not actually too bothered about what's written about me because I've come to realise that Suranne Jones is one person and they're always going to write about this girl that I don't even recognise half the time."

She looks just like Karen, and somehow not much like Karen. And exactly like her when she pulls one of Karen's repertoire of slack-jawed, dim babe faces. She can slip into Karen all too easily.

She tells me about where she grew up, Oldham, which is "quite green. Lots of jokes about sheeps". Sheeps?

"Here's Karen," I say, getting over-excited.

"Oh yeah," she says, shaking her head, "sheeps and drownded. God, I need to shake that girl off."

She has established a pretty good relationship with the character by maintaining a distance. When she talks about a website called Celebrity Cleavage she says, "It's pictures of my boobs as Karen."

Still, I say, the boobs have done quite well for her. An early gig involved performing for 16-year-olds in something called Theatre in Education. Her feedback form said: "The one with dark hair's got big boobs."

Now critics write nice things about her acting. "Yeah, and the boobs as well."

Jones, and the actor who plays Steve, are in big demand at a thing called Truck Fest, which involves meeting truck drivers and "signing things for them. Really interesting and glamorous". No wonder, she says, "I'm slightly crazy myself. It's definitely potty."

"You could be a movie star," she says, "and walk down the street and people wouldn't come up to you the way they do with soap actors, because you're in their livingrooms at home five nights a week [in the UK] and people think they know you. And you can't ever get away from your character."

Which brings us to the tricky bit. Because, being a paid up member of the bonkers club who also writes about Coro, I know all too well the consequences of giving even the tiniest detail away. And unlike some other irresponsible sorts out there, I have no intention of doing so.

If you really don't want to know anything about what happens to Karen look away for the next two paragraphs.

Most of us already know that Karen has left Coro; actually she left last Friday, which is just plain rude.

"What do you think you're doing?" I wail.

"Oh I know," she says. "Oh God, everyone's so nice, and they say, 'Why are you going?' and it makes you go, 'God, did I make the right decision?' But I definitely have. I've done the comedy. I've done the bitch element. I've done the emotional stuff and I think the longer I stay I could run the risk of people getting bored of what we do. So it's time to find a different character and explore."

The problem with a character like Karen is that Jones will forever be her. "It can drive you a bit mad because even though it's the thing that made you it's also the thing that you can't shake off." So she has no immediate plans: "You do need time to mourn a character. They need time to get used to Coronation Street without that character, and then you can do something else."

She has played Karen for 4 1/2 years and she is only 26.

She says she has learned to play at being someone else.

"People who say that it doesn't change you as a person - I think it does. Obviously it does. You have to watch yourself. You're aware of everything you say and you are so aware of who you are that sometimes you do walk around on your guard."

She was a bit fat at school and she had "big boobs from an early age and I was just different".

She was unhappy at secondary school and was nicknamed Greenpeace "and I didn't understand it and they said, 'Save the whale"'.

She's got her own back though, because the "loveable, mischievous mess" that is Karen is partly based on those bullying cows at school.

Her clumsiness comes from Jones who will "fall over anything there is to fall over". She went off to the loo before we started the interview and "slipped and fell up the first stair. So she's got that ditzy side from me".

She became an actor because she was told to be a hairdresser and found she was "rubbish" at cutting hair but quite good at entertaining the customers. She was also rubbish at being a barmaid, but quite good at tap-dancing behind the bar.

She is pretty confident now but not so long ago "you know a situation like this would make me pour with sweat before you'd even arrived".

But oh dear, she does get bored "of the sound of my own voice sometimes. You think, 'God, do they really want to hear this?"

Oh they do but she still thinks that "sometimes people can be slightly disappointed if I'm not as brash as they'd like me to be".

"I think they'd probably like me to go up and say, 'Hi ya! areyouallright?' like Karen. You know, to meet someone so much larger than life ... "

I can't think why anyone would be disappointed. Although I would quite like to have met her in PJs, drunk as a skunk.