Coleman's lucky Doctor Who break

New Doctor Who assistant Jenna-Louise Coleman says her luck was in when it came to landing the high-profile TV role.

The former Emmerdale actress, 25, said that Men On Waves, the codename given to the job when she went for the audition, had an auspicious meaning.

"I worked out that Men On Waves is an anagram of Woman Seven, because this is the seventh series. Weirdly, seven is my lucky number and this is my seventh job," she told the Radio Times.

"I wasn't allowed to say it was Doctor Who at any point - not talking to my agent, not when I arrived at the audition, and I certainly couldn't tell anyone at all what I was up to next," she said.

Jenna-Louise, who was unveiled last week as Karen Gillan's replacement in the BBC sci-fi series, said that she had been turned down for roles because of her past as a soap actress.

She was rejected by drama school Rada and did not work for a year after starring in Waterloo Road and in Yorkshire soap Emmerdale as lesbian Jasmine Thomas.

"It's very easy for people to put you in a box and I've been fighting very hard against that," she said.

The Blackpool-born actress, who is also set to appear in Julian Fellowes' TV drama Titanic, said of the prospect of working with special effects: "I haven't had to talk to anyone who wasn't there before, but in Titanic, I did have to talk to a paper cup as if it were a person on a ship. So maybe that was good practice..."

She said of her new role: "In Emmerdale, I murdered somebody and in Waterloo Road, I murdered somebody so now I'm hoping to have fun. Lots of it."