FOR some actresses leaving a top-rated soap is nothing short of professional suicide but former Coronation Street star Angela Griffin hasn't looked back since waving Weatherfield goodbye.

It's now four years since her character feisty hairdresser Fiona Middleton left the famous cobbled street behind and since then she has never been short of work and has appeared in a whole string of TV acting roles.

These have included medical drama Holby City, Murder In Mind and Cutting It, and she has recently won a role in the Pauline Quirke drama Down To Earth.

Next week the 26-year-old actress is back on our screens playing sexy salsa dancing teacher Chantelle in the second series of Babyfather, which returns to BBC Two, on Wednesday.

In the first series her character met and married Gus, played by David Harewood, after a whirlwind romance but in real life the singleton actress says she is nowhere near settling down.

"I do want to get married but I don't know when it will happen. Six weeks, six months or six years - I haven't got near it yet. Perhaps somebody will come along and sweep me off my feet and I will know that they are the one I'm going to marry?

"I always thought that I was a relationship type of girl. But with all my work I just don't have time for a relationship at the moment.

"I have been hurt in the past and I think it has made me more cynical about relationships. It has also taught me that there are more things to do than worry about what somebody else is doing."

Her most publicised romance was with Casualty star Will Mellor. The couple split up three years ago and Mellor later claimed they were on the verge of getting married when they parted - something Griffin denies.

She says: "That's rubbish. It made me really angry when I heard what he had said in that magazine interview."

Although she is content to be single at the moment Griffin has very clear ideas of what she thinks are a turn on and turn off when it comes to the opposite sex.

"Men generally say what they mean. So if they tell you that you look nice then they tend to mean it," she says. "But I do hate the way some men generalise about women and put them all into the same category."

When she says she doesn't have time for a relationship because of work commitments, she's probably not kidding. As well as Babyfather, a second series of Cutting It is about to start filming and she'll also be putting on her wellies to play a farmer's wife in rural drama Down To Earth.

She says: "I play a woman who is stepmum to the farmer's three children. I had to do things like muck out the pigs and see to the other animals. Which meant I was working with children and animals."

Griffin says she's quite different from many of her screen roles. "If I don't know people very well I can be shy and quiet. But it comes from the fact that I'm not as confident as I might appear to most people, which I think is the case for a lot of actors, I just don't know what to say.

"It's different if somebody comes up to me to chat and then I will talk all day long."