Storing £ (pound sterling) sig n and displaying in HTML email

Could someone please point me in the right direction here please? I have a form textarea field (submitted using POST) that accepts free text that will include the likes of '£' (pound sterling symbol) that is written to a MySql database and later retrieved to output into an HTML email. I have been experimenting with htmlentities, htmlspecialchars and addslashes but still have the problem whereby I get "&ACirc;" preceeding the "£" Could someone kindly suggest what I'm doing wrong and what function(s) I should be looking into? Thanks -- Graham