ALEX Parks could be the exception that proves the rule that talent-TV shows are a bad, bad thing - a rule to which even the young singer herself adheres to.

"I don't think much of them, really," Alex told Mono this week. "Pop music is really, really dry at the moment. It's kind of finishing. People coming from pop programmes was kind of the last dribble."

Alex won the TV talent contest Fame Academy then made a platinum selling album, Introduction, from which her new single, Cry is taken. She went from a nobody, a stage hand at the circus tent at the Glastonbury festival, to a critically acclaimed and very popular pop star in ten months.

But talking to her from the bowels of London's PR land there was no hint of a fevered ego - just a young girl with talent with her feet placed squarely on the ground.

"I haven't a clue how long I'm going to be doing this for," she said bluntly. "It could all end just like that. But I hope to be doing it for at least a while!" And she's no manufactured starlet either - despite making it through Fame Academy.

For two years she played the pubs and clubs of Cornwall in a band called One Trick Pony.

It was her dad who had the idea to send a tape to the Fame Academy people which led to an audition, which as we all know, was on camera from the first.

"I was scared," she said. "I had to sing straight down the camera lens, which was really off-putting."

She explained that the programme was as it seemed. There was no behind the scenes bitching between the contestants and no animosity directed at her once she'd won.

"People that were friends were friends because they wanted to be," she said.

"Somebody had to win. People were very supportive towards me. If somebody else had won it would have been just the same for me." If she'd not won Alex says she'd be travelling the world or doing some courses, like a typical teenager might.

Her favourite band of the moment, or at least one she's listening to avidly, are the Black Eyed Peas.

She loves the Stereophonics who she saw at Glastonbury but has no time for the Manic Street Preachers.

"I used to be into that sort of stuff when I was an indie kid but for some reason I never got into them," she said. "I really don't like them." Later this week she's appearing on Top Of The Pops but like most 18-year-old's she not afraid to slag that programme off either.

"I'm not too impressed with the new format," she states. "But it is live now, I suppose."

Her heart is full of music and promise so it's no surprise that she has some Welsh background to her. Her father's aunt lives somewhere in Cardiff, which is all she could remember right then.

Cry is released on Monday, February 16. Live dates will follow later in 2004.