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Five minutes into our interview and she has told me, straight-faced, that her ultimate ambition is to become the British Oprah Winfrey.
'Obviously, I haven't got an exact time scale for it. I can't say I want to do it in five years, or ten, but that's the ultimate goal. I would love to have my own chat show. I'd love to be able to address serious issues, and keep a foot in the entertainment world. I just want to do it all, and I think you can. Oprah has.'
On the surface it's preposterous, of course. Just a few years ago, Alesha was a member of girl band Mis-Teeq, a household name only in houses with teenage girls.
Now, though, she's everywhere. In Arlene Phillips's chair on the Strictly judging panel. In Downing Street, where Gordon Brown - presumably with wide-eyed envy, - described her as a 'national treasure'. A couple of weeks ago she was presenting the Mobo music awards but breaking away from the Autocue to perform her recent single, Drummer Boy.
She's also found the time to make a number of documentaries on issues as diverse as absent fathers and airbrushing in magazines. Each programme is a little more hard-hitting than the last - and more under her control, too, it seems.
'I've actually set up my own company to do the documentaries now,' she points out.
'I kind of got to the point where I thought, "Why listen to other people pitching ideas, and taking control of a project, when I can do it myself." If I'm going to do something I'm passionate about, I want to be able to control it. Thankfully, I've reached the stage in my life where I can.'
Such ambition is laudable, of course. As she points out, Oprah wouldn't be where she is today if she'd let other people make her career decisions for her. But the more Alesha talks, the more you wonder whether this almost obsessive desire for control is entirely about mapping out her future. Or could it be more about making sense of her past? She's the one who poses the question.