Factfile
Name: Emma Ledden
Age: 22
Born: Cork
Lives: London and Dublin
Occupation: TV Presenter
Famous for: Becoming a presenter on MTV
Why in the news: This morning she takes over from Zoe Ball as the presenter of the BBC's weekly children's show, Live and Kicking
Perhaps it's what they're putting in the school dinners at Mount Sackville, Co Dublin. Whatever it is, the school is responsible for a new breed of model student.
The list of clothes horses and TV presenters who have passed through the school includes sisters Amanda and Natasha Byram, as well as a host of other pretty and well-known faces. Emma Ledden is the latest in a long line, but as she starts her new job this morning she becomes the catwalk diva who really got the cream.
The top-of-the-range trainers she finds her self stepping into for the new series of BBC's flagship children's TV programme Live and Kicking belonged to Zoe Ball, but it is an act she is unlikely to try to follow. Ball was at the vanguard of the ladette movement, a lager-swilling, swearing girlie, and against that Ledden will make a refreshing change.
Make no mistake, Ledden likes to have fun, but these days she is more likely to be snapped shopping in Harvey Nicks with her mum, Sue, than skulling margaritas in the Met Bar. At 22, and with a year of celebrity London living as an MTV presenter under her belt, she has only been to the trendy watering hole once.
"The BBC seems to have made a conscious effort to go for someone who is the antithesis of Ball," said one observer. Insiders say the station was impressed by her natural ability, her good looks and, with an eye on millions of impressionable viewers obsessed with Boyzone, The Corrs and Westlife, her Irishness.
It was her looks, though, that set her on the path to TV stardom. At 14, she says, she was "a skinny girl with no boobs" but by the age of 17 she had, er, matured enough to make a pretty lucrative part-time living with Assets modelling agency.
The rest of the time she was attending college at night in Ballyfermot, studying journalism, and later working at D-Side magazine, carrying out editorial research and writing movie reviews. She was under no illusions about her modelling career.
"I'm not that tall, just 5 6["], and the fact that I wasn't tall enough meant modelling wasn't something I was ever going to do exclusively," she says.
She was 18 when she auditioned for the position of resident gossip and music correspondent with DenTV with co-hosts Ray d'Arcy and Dustin the Turkey. The story goes that Ledden's appearance in Montrose caused a serious stir among male employees in the days just before the station was flooded with male and female superbabes.
D'Arcy, who now presents 2Phat on Network 2 with Zig and Zag, remembers when Ledden turned up for her first audition in front of the camera. "Back then she was a novice but she was an absolute natural and she shone," he says. "She was well able for Dustin as well, which is always a good sign."
What also impressed d'Arcy was her adaptability. "She had come from a modelling background which catapults people into a kind of false maturity, but she easily adapted to presenting to a young audience," he says.
Her first break outside this country came with the help of something Ledden has had plenty of in her short career - luck. When Ray d'Arcy decided to leave The Den, Ledden became, courtesy of the rumour mill, the hot favourite to replace him.
There was no truth in the gossip but it caused enough interest for the men's magazine Loaded to run a piece on the budding starlet. The article was spotted by MTV, which was looking for fresh, new presenters, and Ledden more than fitted the bill.
The new job meant a new home in the posh north London suburb of Hampstead, but the city didn't immediately appeal to Ledden. She began reading news at MTV and this wasn't a presenting format that initially she felt comfortable with. "I wasn't as natural as I would have liked reading somebody else's words. Live TV is where I really feel myself," she says.
From the music news she went on to present most of the other MTV slots. Posing for glossy magazines in revealing outfits or tight rubber was "part and parcel of the job", she says. "I'm not ashamed of anything I did, I don't think I ever went too far but it is a good way to promote yourself, although now that I am doing children's TV I don't think it will be something I will continue."
Ledden's musical tastes, Britney Spears and Destiny's Child, would never see her fronting the more alternative end of MTV, and her ideal girls' night out in Dublin will start in the Bailey Pub and end in Club 92 or Lillies Bordello. Tom Hanks is her ideal man, but her longest relationship to date has been with an actor who starred in an ad for a throat lozenge. At the moment she is single.
Although conscious of the fame that awaits her - Zoe Ball's every move was covered in the tabloids - Ledden's friends insist her solid upbringing in Clonsilla, and her small but close circle of friends, will keep her grounded.
"People are always amazed that Emma hasn't changed since The Den and MTV . . . but she is the same generous, supportive friend she has always been," says model Siobhan Kavanagh.
"This is her time," says d'Arcy of Ledden, who was recently voted the most eligible woman in Ireland. He feels that the lack of autocue action on a weekly three-hour live show will be the perfect vehicle to allow Ledden's TV persona to shine through.
As someone once said to her: "You can get the right show and be brilliant or the wrong show and be terrible". If Live and Kicking is the right show, Zoe Ball's prophecy that Emma Ledden is going to be "one of the hottest properties in the business" may turn out to be more than just a kindly burst of celebrity solidarity.