By Ian Youngs BBC News Online entertainment staff

When she was a child, Jessica Garlick would watch the Eurovision Song Contest with her mother, who told her: "One day, you've got to sing for Britain."

By her late teens, she was dancing around holiday parks with her mates singing Gina G or Katrina and the Waves - she was brought up on Eurovision.

So in 2002, she says she will be fulfilling an ambition when she represents the UK in the annual competition that is revered and ridiculed in equal measure.

Garlick has been promoting her song in Estonia

Alongside entrants from 23 other countries, she will perform to 10,000 people in Tallinn, Estonia, plus another 120 million on TV around the globe.

Judges and viewers across the continent will then get voting on who they thought was best.

"Since I was a little girl, I was always interested in Eurovision," Garlick, 21, from Kidwelly, Wales, says.

"As part of a family, we'd all sit and watch it."

"It's always something I've wanted to do. I just feel so proud to be representing the country - the fact that Britain chose me and put all this faith in me that I can do this. It just feels a really, really good thing to be doing."

The Spanish entrant, Rosa, was a star of their Pop Idol

Despite the musical snobbery that inspires countless snide remarks, many people take Eurovision very seriously.

It has the power to make or break a career - to create an international hit or sink a promising young singer without a trace.

It can also carry huge international prestige - a way for some countries, like Estonia, who won last year, to get rare time in the cultural spotlight.

For Garlick, it is a good way to remind the public that she has not simply faded away since coming ninth in the hugely popular television talent search, Pop Idol.

She is still facing an uphill struggle to carve out a career as a successful singer, but is not worried that the route to fame is littered with the skeletons of starlets who tried to take the Eurovision short-cut.

Garlick has tipped the Estonian entrant, Sahlene

"I'm not worried at all. I just think that on Eurovision, the people pick you to go and represent them, so they obviously believe in you," she says.

"But people are fickle. They do change their minds. You've just got to try to keep them interested, I suppose."

Garlick's song, a ballad called Come Back, has already reached number 13 in the UK chart, helped - at least in part - by the Pop Idol factor.

The show was "a fantastic experience, fantastic exposure", Garlick says, and gave her invaluable practice at singing live to a huge audience.

"I would love to have won, but that's not why I was there," she says.

Three transvestites are representing Slovenia

"I was there hoping that somebody would recognise what I would do. And things are staring to move in the direction I always wanted them to."

Garlick is rated third favourite by bookmakers to triumph in Tallinn - behind Sweden and Germany.

She tips the Estonian and Austrian entries after seeing a video of her competitors.

"And then there's... should you say your stereotypical type of Eurovision ones," she says with a sarcastic smile.

"There's three transvestites. I'm not quite sure where they're from - it was so funny, I forgot the country." They are from Slovenia, for the record.

"Some of the songs are fantastic, and some of them are... very, very humorous, shall we say."

Eurovision may be her ambition, but she can still laugh at Eurovision's more ridiculous side.