Few people have had a career as varied as Janet Ellis. Among the list of professions she can lay claim to are television presenter, actress, national newspaper agony aunt and now acclaimed novelist.

Her debut novel The Butcher’s Hook is out this week and the former Blue Peter presenter, 60, is delighted to be releasing her first work of fiction.

She told us: “I am really excited. It is extraordinary and absolutely delicious.”

Janet was inspired to put pen to paper at a young age but, like many would-be writers, never got round to writing her novel.

“Why? Lots of reasons, really,” she said. “A lot to do with cowardice, probably laziness, probably vanity too because I wanted it to be good and worth doing.

“It is a funny thing, isn’t it? When you want to write a book, you always put a capital ‘B’ in front of it.”

The intervening years have hardly been unproductive. Aside from Blue Peter, her work has included acting roles on television shows such as Doctor Who and Waking the Dead, and appearances on the likes of The Wright Stuff and a Come Dine with Me celebrity special (which she won).

That’s not to mention raising three children, among them the pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

With a soldier for a father, Janet moved around in early childhood but her family settled in north Kent when she was a child and she went to school near Sevenoaks.

She said: “Kent was amazingly important. My dad was in the Army so we moved quite a lot.

“Kent was the first place my parents bought a house, which meant that I could choose the colour of my bedroom and put things on the bedroom walls.

“The first two years I had there, when I was at school in Otford, it was home.

“When I was about 14, my parents moved to just over the bridge to Richmond and that again is a very special place for me.

“We’re in Hammersmith now but I am very fond and I always like going back there.”

In her earlier years, Janet’s varied career even included stints working as an assistant stage manager at the Orange Tree Theatre and at the front desk of our very own office in Richmond.

She said: “It was before I went to drama school. I was there for about nine months, I think.

“I fibbed and said I was going to be there forever but I just needed a bit of a job to tide me over from the bit from when I auditioned until I got into drama school.

“It was lovely, though. I worked on the front desk so I was in charge of saying hello to people who came into the newspaper office and I did the small ads.”

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Timing, Janet said, was the key component that persuaded her to make a concerted effort with her novel.

She said: “For a start, my family and friends became entirely sick of me saying ‘I want to write a book’.”

Janet enrolled on a creative writing course at Curtis Brown and, after completing it, went on to finally finish writing a novel.

You might imagine that her name and background made it easier to get published. But Janet submitted the manuscript under a pseudonym.

She said: “I’m going to start claiming credit for that but actually it was my agent’s idea. When he first said it I thought ‘are you joking?’

“But actually, not that I’m super-mega famous or anything but things I have done in the past are quite iconic and distinctive and I suppose he thought if anyone goes ‘Oh, Blue Peter’ they might pick it up and be expecting something.

“It’s not necessarily that they are getting something wildly different, it is more that what they are getting is me writing the book rather than anything influenced by what I have done in the past.

“After he had pulled it off, I just thought ‘gosh, what a brilliant thing’.

“Now it is the detail that I hug to myself because I know that whatever happens – and I never mind talking about anything I have done in the past or any of my family – but I do know that right at the core of it was just my book.”

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It was not just the publisher that liked The Butcher’s Hook, critics and fellow authors have been going wild for it too.

The Daily Express made it one of their Books to Look Out for in 2016 and The Observer included Janet in their New Faces of Fiction 2016, writing: “The Butcher’s Hook doesn’t read like a first novel – it is a high-finish performance… You need to be braced for violence to rival any Jacobean tragedy: The Butcher’s Hook will hook you.”

The novel is set in Georgian England and is about 19-year-old, Anne, who falls in love with butcher’s apprentice Fub. But Anne’s parents have already chosen a more suitable husband.

Though Janet did not have the whole story in her head when she started writing, she was drawn by the possibilities of Georgian England.

She said: “I have always had a bit of a thing about Georgian England. Like most people, I live the art and the architecture and the lovely flourishing men.

“It gets a bit buried in every sense by the Victorians who were a bit bossy and stood on top of everything. Living in London as I do, I see it and the features of it.

“I like the idea of that time and the noise and smell of it. And also that somebody growing up then would have had very few influences on them. They could make moral judgments entirely in their heads and then act on them.”

THE BUTCHER’S HOOK by Janet Ellis is out now in Two Roads hardback priced £14.99 and is also available as an ebook.