'I'm enjoying a quieter life' the big interview.

JAN Pearson is deeply hurt by suggestions her screen Birmingham accent might not be quite up to scratch.

"I'm mortified if people think it's a Brummie accent!" cries Jan, who plays receptionist Karen Hollins in the daily soap Doctors.

"It's a Black Country accent. I realise that people outside the Midlands might not realise there's a difference, but I hope I'm talking like someone from Stourbridge."

That's where Jan comes from - Wollaston, to be exact - and she's keen to reproduce the vocal tones she grew up with.

The former pupil of High Park School continues: "My accent on Doctors is toned down, though. I remember not being able to understand someone from the next village. The really broad accents of people from Cradley or Lye could be almost impenetrable.

"I worked in a pub, the Royal Exchange on Stourbridge High Street. I remember a customer asking me for a tea towel and I had no idea what he meant."

Jan shot to fame playing Ward Sister Kath Shaughnessy in Holby City - and now she's back in another medical drama, but this time behind a desk at The Mill Health Centre and not healing patients.

She started work on Birmingham-made Doctors a year ago. In July, viewers were introduced to the rest of Karen's family - her police sergeant husband of 20 years, Rob, played by Chris Walker, and their children, 18-year-old Jack (Nicolas Woodman) and 16-year-old Imogen (Charlie Clemmow). "It's a delight to play scenes with Chris. I started six months before he did, knowing I was going to get a husband. They asked me for suggestions about who I'd like to work with but I left it up to the casting director. It was like having an arranged marriage! But I couldn't be happier with Chris.

"It's the first time the show has had a proper family and one that's largely functional. They've resisted the temptation to give them lots of problems. It couldn't be further from Holby, as Karen is fun-loving with a happy home life."

Stabbed Jan was certainly put through the wringer in Holby - she had a hysterectomy, emergency surgery after her husband beat her up, an affair with a priest and stood trial for helping her terminally-ill second husband die on their honeymoon.

Oh, and she was stabbed in the heart by her mad colleague.

Not that Karen's life is all smooth sailing. She is the only one at The Mill who doesn't know that her beloved teenage son is having an affair with one of the doctors, Zara Carmichael (Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh). But next week she discovers the truth.

"When she finds out, she has an extraordinary reaction!" teases Jan.

"The thing I like about Doctors is that it can go from emotional, gritty and realistic storylines into flights of fancy.

"I hadn't appreciated how comedic and camp Doctors is. I've never attempted to play a comic character on TV before and it's a real challenge to make people laugh.

"They dress me up in the weirdest, wildest things. I was the Mad Hatter in a fantasy sequence, I've just been impersonating a member of a rock band, and when Karen was trying to spice things up in her marriage they put me in a black PVC bondage suit!

"I had to be squeezed in and it was excruciatingly painful to wear. I love the mad dressing up but I do miss my Holby nurse's uniform. There was a real surety about knowing what you were going to be wearing all day."

That uniform attracted a certain type of viewer who wrote saucy fan mail letters and voted Jan the 'most snoggable' star of Holby City, beating Tina Hobley.

Now Jan has turned 50 but says: "It's just another birthday to me. I don't feel like I've grown up, I'm quite a playful person. I don't feel my age, although I feel I'm looking it more and more."

She lives in Suffolk with her partner, TV director Richard Signy. Her mother still lives in Stourbridge while her brother Dave and his family live in Birmingham - not that she has much time to see them.

"They are one of the reasons why I took this job, but it's hard to spend time with them when you're working 12 hours a day.

"I rent a house in Harborne and go home to Suffolk every weekend. I lived in London for 20 years and never enjoyed it. Now we love being able to hide ourselves away in the middle of nowhere."

fact file NAME: Jan Pearson AGE: 50 CV: Jan has appeared in The Cops, Holby City, Where The Heart Is and The Bill. She also played the Witch in the RSC's Christmas production Beauty And The Beast. FANCY THAT: Jan previously played two other characters in Doctors - a woman dying of cancer and one slowly poisoning her cheating husband.

CAPTION(S):

DRAMA: Jan Pearson has swapped Holby City (left) for Doctors.