Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran0:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:03

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:14

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:38

My castaway this week is the writer Catelyn Moran, columnist, novelist, dramatist. Her methods may vary, but her message stays pretty constant. Amid a contemporary landscape of unprecedented verbiage, her voice rings clear and true and funny. She is very funny. And her ability to constantly analyse, articulate, and amuse is, frankly, a smidge dazzling. She writes two weekly columns for The Times, has published five books, the first aged just sixteen, and co-written an award-winning sitcom, too.

Presenter1:10

If you already enjoy her work, you will certainly know she was born one of eight children, raised in a council estate on benefits, and home schooled from the age of eleven. I say schooled. Her parents basically left her to it. She didn't sit any exams, but she did read every book in her local Wolverhampton library.

Presenter1:26

She says, I believe in giddy, deluded, intoxicated optimism because

Presenter1:32

That is the fuel that will keep you going long after anger and righteousness or fear have burned out. I look everywhere for things to make me optimistic. So welcome, Catelyn Moran. Uh you're a star columnist, as we know for the Times, and columnists they're often hired for their ability to sort of rage and fulminate and tell the world how it should be. What's your purpose?

Caitlin Moran1:52

That's when you write. Ooh, rage is very bad for the complexion. No, I don't like rage. It's all about angles, really. Columnists either go, this is fantastic, or usually this is a bad thing. And I like to sort of walk around the snooker table of topics and kind of come at it from a different angle, like, how did this happen? Or what will happen if this continues? Or my favourite one is to simply boggle. A lovely boggle rather than being outraged at something is a much better way of doing something. And I actually do want to change people's minds and give people different ideas. You do want to change people's minds.

Presenter2:18

I mean you are absolutely

Caitlin Moran2:19

I mean you are

Presenter2:19

You are of

Caitlin Moran2:20

Loudly a thousand.

Presenter2:20

Feminist, you are left-wing in your views, it is your purpose to change people's minds.

Caitlin Moran2:22

It is

Caitlin Moran2:24

Is it in print? Oh, I'm total metropolitan liberal elite. I've had a t-shirt made up with that written on it, because I think they're all brilliant words. Metropolitan, living in cities, that's fantastic. These are crucibles where incredible ideas and different people get to meet each other and this is how we progress as a society. Liberal, absolutely, yes, I believe everybody should be just allowed to do whatever they want so long as they're not hurting anyone else. And elite, elite is the best word of all. Elite means you spent twenty or thirty years trying to be the best at something.

Presenter2:47

Of course, I mean, you're deliberately choosing, of course, to misunderstand the phrase for the effect of comedy, and it worked. But also, you write about things like masturbation and abortion and menstruation. These are not the typical things that people might choose to read about as they slather marmalade on their toast of a morning. So there's things that you think. Should

Caitlin Moran3:05

Be off limits? I mean, I always felt these were things that I wanted to talk about, and I was aware that they were not the kind of thing that you're supposed to talk about. And it took me a while to realize that.

Caitlin Moran3:13

You know, you open up your newspaper and read about war all the time. You'll be reading about millions of people dying. And yet, being able to write about masturbation is seen as wrong. I mean, it's the same in films, like now I'm writing films and scripts. You know, I've had these conversations where I'm like, you know, I want to show menstruation, I want to show a girl having a period. And people will sort of blench and be a bit scared and you'll be like, but I've gone and seen a million films where I've seen thousands and thousands of gallons of blood shed in war, and I've not seen a single millilitre of menstrual blood, which is, let's not forget, the blood of life. There's no war there. If we did not have periods, this world would be completely empty. The weirdness of the things that we seek to be taboo is something that, you know, is a great pleasure to sit down as a writer because you just look, and to me, it feels like I've got an open field. Very few people are writing about benefits or being working class or shame or being fat, mental illness, all the things that I like to write about. So it's an empty field. I get to be first. Yeah.

Presenter4:03

You were writing for the music paper Melody Maker when you were just sixteen and and we've made you today choose eight. It must have been a complete torture, I imagine.

Caitlin Moran4:11

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, you start off thinking, this is a great honour, and 10 minutes later, you're like, this is the worst thing I've ever been asked to do in my life. On that basis, tell me about it.

Presenter4:18

Tell me about this tell me about this first

Caitlin Moran4:20

Yeah. One colour Uh

Presenter4:20

Moran, what do we

Caitlin Moran4:21

Uh

Presenter4:21

Can I

Caitlin Moran4:21

Oh, well, the Beatles. I can't really trust anybody who wouldn't choose at least one Beatles song for their list. We were brought up in a house with no religion and no rules and no boundaries and not much heating. And the only sort of framework we had for belief was the Beatles. They were our Jesus.

Speaker 44:36

We'll shake it up baby now Shake it up baby Twist and child Twist and child Come, come, come, come baby now

Speaker 44:46

BAY GO

Speaker 44:53

I'm in a

Speaker 44:54

You know, you look so good.

Speaker 44:57

I'm so good, you know you got me going now Just like a new you

Speaker 45:09

I've been

Presenter5:10

That was Twist and Shout, The Beatles. Catelyn Moran, you've described your father as a a would-be rock star who never fulfilled his potential. How much did he believe that he would?

Caitlin Moran5:20

Oh, absolutely. It was always pending. It was one of those this time. I mean, when we used to watch Only Fools and Horses and Delboy would go, this time next year, Rodders will be millionaires. That was absolutely the mantra in our house. Because he'd been in a band. They'd been signed to a record label. He was being produced by Bowie's producer, Tony Visconti. He was kind of on the scene. He was a hot young man. And then the band broke up and he came back to Wolverhampton and had all these kids and retrained as a fireman and then a washing machine repairman. And then he developed arthritis and we had to go on to benefits. And he was still next year, I will be back in the music industry again. Next year we'll be in London. You'll be living in a huge house. I'm going to make it. He was always recording these songs and it was always pending to the point where when we were watching Live Aid, he would be absolutely furious that he wasn't on Live Aid.

Presenter6:03

You were the eldest child. How much did you believe it, as you were growing up?

Caitlin Moran6:06

Oh, totally. We were in an industry formed around supporting our dad, getting us back to London. I'd been given a calligraphy pen for my Christmas present, one of a series of useless presents when I didn't have a bed or a bedside lamp or any clothes. So I taught myself calligraphy and I would be the one that would have to write the addresses of all the different record labels onto the demos that we would send out in jiffy bags that would then return a couple of months later with rejection letters.

Presenter6:26

This state of perpetual hope then, that seems like an important thing. You have chosen, as we say, to be o as I said earlier, to be optimistic. Is that is that where it comes from then, this idea that the sun will come out tomorrow?

Caitlin Moran6:37

Yes, absolutely. And I guess from the books that I read as well, like kind of I didn't realise, but all the literature that I read and all the films that I watched, Annie and Annie, everything that Judy Garland was ever in, Jane Eyre, they're all just kind of weird working class girls who they hang on in there and it was always all right in the end.

Presenter6:53

Um, your father had met your mother when she was at Sussex University and she she dropped out to marry him. What are your earliest memories of your mum as a mum?

Caitlin Moran7:01

Mum. She was always pregnant, obviously, because she had to pump out eight kids and she would have a baby. She'd come back, she'd usually be quite ill. And sort of when the baby was about two, she would sort of hand it over to me and the rest of the kids and go off and have another baby. And then we would have the kid and we could have a new member. The best people I know in the world are my siblings. We would laugh so much. And when we all meet up, it is still the same as it always was. We just cry until we are weak. We talk over each other. You may think I'd speak quite quickly. This is so slow compared to how I would be with my siblings.

Presenter7:31

So how I would be with my siblings.

Caitlin Moran7:33

When you come from the big family, you can talk over each other, reply to each other, whilst doing some kind of weird circular breathing.

Presenter7:38

Being the eldest of eight children, being raised in this, I mean, a pretty small, I'm guessing, three-bedroom council house.

Presenter7:45

What are your most pungent memories of poverty? Because poverty sears itself onto

Caitlin Moran7:52

Okay.

Presenter7:52

Pretty cool.

Caitlin Moran7:52

Pungent is the right word. It's primarily smells. The smell of boiling potatoes. The combination of hot dust and kind of chip fat on a curtain. Ice inside the windows. Towels mainly. You know, when you're poor, you don't know what a dry towel is. All the towels are wet all the time because you're sharing them amongst so many people. And also being able to identify a specific sibling or parent from their smell that they'd left on a towel.

Presenter8:14

You have said that I was raised on benefits has become my unlikely catchphrase. Why do you choose to write about it?

Caitlin Moran8:22

Well, I guess because being brought up as a child of Thatcher, you know, you're constantly told that kind of, you know, the cream will rise. You're told that if you do have innate talent, you will progress. And I look around and go, okay, if that was true, there should be lots of other people who were raised on benefits who've got jobs like mine, you know, or writers or, you know, screenwriters or whatever. And there just isn't. I am the exception, pretty much. Culture and art and the media are supposed to be a mirror to show us what we are. And that mirror is so hopelessly bowed and broken and distorted that we do not see what we are as a country. And if we cannot see what we are, how can we progress? How can we have any politics? Things do not change. So that's why it's incredibly important for me to try and be a bit of the mirror that can represent people who are on benefits and go, yeah, you are seen. You are heard. I will talk about your story.

Presenter9:09

Let's have some music, Count Lamaran. Tell me about it.

Caitlin Moran9:11

Your second.

Caitlin Moran9:12

Ooh, Kate Bush. So, 79 Wuthering Heights on Top of the Pops. The thing about Top of the Pops was, at 6 o'clock you'd have the news, which would be about war and who died. And then you'd have Top of the Pops at 7, which would tell you all the amazing things. We've invented this new kind of person. We've invented this new kind of band. Here's a new way that you can have your hair. And when Kate Bush appeared, that was the first time that I saw someone who I went, oh my god, that could be me. This could change my life. Primarily because she appeared to be wearing a 90 and just spinning around around on the spot. And that to me was an achievable look that I could do. I could be Kate Bush.

Speaker 49:47

On the widthy windy moors we'd roll and fall in queen.

Caitlin Moran9:53

Uh

Speaker 49:55

You had a temper, like my jealousy, too hard, too greedy.

Caitlin Moran9:55

You have

Speaker 410:03

How could you leave me when I needed to possess you? I hated you, I loved you too.

Speaker 410:13

Bad twins in the night He told me I was going to lose the plant Leave me high walking through, walking through, walking through the hijack

Presenter10:27

Kate Bush and Wothering Heights, you were dancing then, aged four, you probably would have been when that came out, and you are dancing still, I should say.

Caitlin Moran10:33

I've just partially dislocated my shoulder doing the wavy hand thing, so I regret that now.

Presenter10:37

Catlin Moran, words and thoughts and humours seemed to come sort of gushing out of you, spewing out of you almost in a torrent. Were you like that as a little girl, as a little schoolgirl?

Caitlin Moran10:48

Uh yeah, yes. I mean I can remember having, very young, having no friends and I couldn't read yet, but I knew books were like a shield that would keep you safe and were a door into a world that you could escape through. So I just had a copy of The Railway Children, which I was reading upside down because I could not read, whilst everybody else was running around and having fun and playing Knickerchase and Kiss Chase. And why were you not?

Presenter11:09

But what

Caitlin Moran11:11

I had not gone to nursery because I screamed so much on the way to school. My mother had had to literally physically drag me into nursery on the first day. And so on the second day she just went, Oh, I'm not going to take you to school then. So when then everybody turned up for the first day at infant school, they all knew each other and I didn't. But I mean y you know, I've interviewed so many people who are creative and have done things and that almost all of them were observers rather than taking part.

Presenter11:33

You won a scholarship to Wolverhampton Girls' School and you left after how many weeks?

Caitlin Moran11:38

I was there for four weeks. Was it just four weeks? Uh it just they were all posh. They'd all had tutors or been to prep schools and they you know they'd been taught things like algebra and I hadn't. And there was immediately bullying. There was a girl who hated me straight away'cause I was fat and weird. And I'd read enough books about bullying to know that this would continue for years. And what you what you should do is punch that girl in the face. Uh but I just knew that I had a very poor left hook. So um so I just left the school instead.

Presenter12:04

And and and I understand when you use the word posh, what you're t what you're t I know the shorthand that that is for. I mean, your mum, in essence, was posh. She was a middle class girl from a middle class.

Caitlin Moran12:09

Yeah.

Caitlin Moran12:11

Yeah.

Presenter12:14

Household.

Caitlin Moran12:15

Well I suppose yes, but we lived in a three-bedroom canceled house that smelt and at that point my parents had decided that they were going to breed Alsatians in order to earn money because they'd been given to dodgy dogs. Sort of every day you'd have to wake up and fill a a bucket full of boiling water and detel and kind of sweep out the kitchen because it would just be full of puppy poo. So sort of going from that to the posh school surrounded by these posh girls who would be talking about ponies was you know it just the gulf felt too too unbridgeable. It just felt too exhausting.

Presenter12:41

You talk about all of these things in that wonderful, sort of, quick-clipped, humorous, disregarding way, but it uh it cannot feel like that. When you look back.

Presenter12:51

at what was going on in that house.

Presenter12:54

What are you really thinking about it?

Caitlin Moran12:56

I had, because my parents were, I mean we were very poor and very smelly, but my dad particularly, you know, he's very unusual, very clever, very funny. They believed in being funny. They believed in books. And my dad was kind of like a proper hippie. You know, they were sort of into like really big Zen concepts like just breathe, exist in the moment, be aware. Things I didn't really understand at the time, but they did filter through. I can remember sort of at the age of six or seven, sort of like I was washing a wall, because all the walls were dirty, I was washing a wall, and I suddenly thought about myself in the future. And then I realised that once you'd start thinking about yourself in the future, you could start talking to yourself in the future. And that just kind of made it a lot more interesting.

Presenter13:35

But

Caitlin Moran13:36

And what does your current self say to your past self about that childhood? It says remind me of more details from that time because you've got a lot more books and sitcoms and films to mine from this rich seam of tragedy.

Presenter13:49

I like you, but you're slightly infuriating to interview. Tell me about your next piece of music, then we're going to listen to your third. What's next?

Caitlin Moran13:55

Oh, what is next? Oh, Flower Duck Weekender, yes. So, um, we're waiting for my dad to be famous. And then around about the age of thirteen I realized that it wasn't going to happen. So I started to I wrote my first novel when I was thirteen, and then I became a music journalist at sixteen and I came down to London and I was a mad child in a hat.

Caitlin Moran14:13

And everything could happen in a night. I'd gone from being alone in this house and never seeing anyone to going out at night with people taking drugs and people having sex. And Weekended by Flower Dub is all about how one night can change your life and how horribly wrong it can go. So this is why I chose Weekend by Flower Dup.

Speaker 414:34

To the to the tha

Speaker 414:38

I see you every day, you walk the same way.

Speaker 414:42

We can love, long, long

Speaker 414:46

You got to work and Friday is payday

Speaker 414:51

We cannot turn it down.

Speaker 414:55

I give it up, I give your wife up we can love

Presenter15:02

Flowered up and we kender. Catlin Moran, I'm going to slow you down and back you up, because you went very quickly through this extraordinary period of your life, and it was when you were aged thirteen. You had won this. It was an essay competition, was it for Dylan's Bookstore?

Caitlin Moran15:13

Dylan's f

Presenter15:15

And you decided, as a result of that, to set about writing your first novel. Well, I say because of that, but also as you say because you wanted to get to London and you wanted to earn money, and writing seemed like the way you could do that, and you clearly could write. This book.

Presenter15:29

They ended up being published when you were sixteen. Did you get

Caitlin Moran15:32

One of the judges on it was Valerie Grove, the columnist at the Times. And she'd taken an interest in me and had done a feature on me when I was thirteen going, look, this girl is home educated, yet can write. So when I wrote this book, I sent it to her. And when she didn't reply within 24 hours going, and we will give you a publishing contract and you can move down to London now, I was furious. But in the end, she did pass it on to a publisher and they published it when I was 16. I mean when you said the sentence that you wrote your first book at 13, it sounded absolutely ridiculous and I just want to apologize.

Presenter16:02

What did you d

Caitlin Moran16:02

Do it.

Presenter16:02

With the money, how much money did you get?

Caitlin Moran16:04

Well, I thought this is one of the annoying things. If you're working class and you don't know anybody who works in the industry, you've got no idea how it works or how much money you might get. So I presumed that if you wrote a book, you would probably get maybe six or seven million pounds and we would all be fine forever. And then when I'd finally written it and it was about to be published, they said, and your advance will be £1,800. And I was like, holy hoo-hoo, back up, lady! That's not going to support my entire family and jet my life off to London. So then I would still sort of send letters to Valerie Grove at the Times and I went, okay, I've written a book by accident and it's earned me absolutely no money at all. How do you earn money being a writer? And she went, you need to be a journalist, darling, be a columnist. So then I was like, right, hey, hope, I'll be a columnist then. So then I started entering journalism competitions in order to become a columnist.

Presenter16:46

Tell me about your next piece of music, Catlamoran.

Caitlin Moran16:48

My next piece of music, it's my crying section. Crowded House are probably my favourite band. When I was at Melody Maker as a weird 16-year-old girl, when you walked through the door, it was like the cantina in Star Wars. It was full of freaks, and everyone there was very cool and they took drugs and they talked really fast. And then there was this one curly-haired boy who wore a jumper. He was not one of the cool boys, and I ended up having to go back to his house because I'd missed my last train back to Wolfhampton. And on the tube on the way back, he went, I've got a big secret to tell you before you come back to my house. And he went, Don't tell anybody else at Melody Maker, but I like Crowded House. And I went, I like Crowded House too, because you could not like Crowded House if you worked at Melody Maker. They were melodic, they were successful. So this was our big confession that we loved Crowded House. This is why we are now married. And this song, Not the Girl You Think You Are, I was still in a phase at that point where I thought you had to be legendary and just drink and take drugs and just come in a room being witty and incredible. And my husband just went, You don't, how about just being nice instead? And I was like, Oh my god, yeah, that would be far less exhausting. I could do that. And that's what this song is: Not the Girl You Think You Are.

Speaker 417:53

Not the girl you think you are

Speaker 417:57

No, no

Speaker 418:01

They're not his shoes under your bed

Speaker 418:05

Yeah.

Speaker 418:09

Take your places in his car

Speaker 418:12

That you won't forget

Speaker 418:16

No

Presenter18:22

That was crowded house and not the girl you think you are. A little bit before you met the man who would become your husband, Catelyn Moran. At 17 you were living and working in London and you enjoyed a couple of years of what you brilliantly coined two years of rumpeteering. Yes. And you call them your sex quest years. I'm wondering what gave you the confidence to do that at 17 and what you learned. Well, what you learned that we can broadcast.

Caitlin Moran18:50

Hm, absolutely nothing.

Caitlin Moran18:54

They're life experiences, aren't they? I think realizing that life basically divides roughly into two categories: one is amazing experiences, things that are incredible at the time, and the second is things that are awful at the time, but which will later make incredible anecdotes. And that's the majority of the sex that you have in, you know, in your early years. I mean, I've felt quite David Attenborough-esque going out there and kind of like, oh, this is how men work. This is what will happen when we go to bed. And what I learned mainly was that you can't try and recreate things that you've seen in particularly Madonna videos, and particularly the video to Erotica with a very scared 23-year-old man in a bed sit in South London. Because when you start dripping wax onto his genitals without warning him in advance, he will scream and go, What are you doing? Are you insane? And then you'll both sit there trying to pick dried wax off his pubic hair, and it will be impossible. And you'll end up having to shave it off, and he'll be quite lopsided for a while. You won't be able to broadcast that, will you?

Presenter19:46

You got

Presenter19:47

Well, yeah, all of that stays in.

Presenter19:51

Um I I wonder when you're at signings and you meet young girls, how do they respond to you? Because this is new. This is not this has not been written about

Caitlin Moran20:01

Yeah.

Presenter20:01

Before.

Caitlin Moran20:01

Before. No, oh god. Oh, it makes me excited when you say that, because that's all I ever wanted to do. It's, I'll be serious for a second. I'm not going to tell any jokes for a minute. I'm not going to tell any jokes for a minute. It is one of the most extreme and astonishing experiences of my life. So, two years ago, I did a stand-up tour where it was me on stage for like nearly two hours talking about my life. And it would be funny, but it would be truthful and it would be sad. And then afterwards, I would do a signing, and these would go on for like three or four hours. Four or five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred people queuing up to come and meet me. And I would hug every single one of them and I'd sign everything and we'd talk. And I would get a lot of girls crying. And it gets to the point when you've met thousands of people over a couple of months that as they walk towards you, you can see their stories. You can see the girls who are self-harming. You can see the girls who eat too little and are starving themselves. You can see the girls who eat too much to crush down their feelings. You self-harmed yourself. Yeah, I mean, just a tiny bit. You know, I mean, it was the early 90s, this is what we did, kind of. We didn't have the internet then.

Presenter20:58

It's not what people did. I didn't do that in my teenage years. Many, many people I know didn't do that.

Caitlin Moran21:04

I mean, I've written about this, like, kind of, it's...

Caitlin Moran21:07

It's a way of if you haven't got anyone to talk to and you've got all these feelings, you just kind of take the feeling and you physically manifest it on your arm and you can see that's where the problem is for a minute and you go, oh, that's what it is. But what you're really doing is you're writing a message to yourself, going, don't feel this bad again. Learn from this. I'm writing a letter to you in the future. Did writing feel like a release then? I always feel bad talking to other writers because whenever they talk about writing, usually it's kind of like, oh, the blank page. And I've just always found it's the single easiest thing I can do is to write. It sounds weird and perverted, but my mouth waters like I'm about to eat something delicious. Writing is beautiful. The hard bit is the sitting. We must fit in the music, Catelyn. Tell me about the next one. It's your fifth. Okay, this, I think, is probably the most perfect record of all the ones that I've chosen. And before Vogue, I hadn't got Madonna because she looked like a towny girl when she first turned up with Like a Virgin. She was pretty, she was thin, she was really confident, she was wearing fashionable new clothes. And as a fat girl with spectacles who believed that she was Jane Eyre, it was like, well, you would be my enemy and you would not like me. Vogue comes along and I'm like, no, I get it. It was the first time I'd seen a woman be successful and mainstream and it looked brilliant. She wasn't alternative. She was trying to be supreme.

Speaker 422:24

Look around, everywhere your turn is high. It's everywhere that you go, no. You try everything you can to escape. No pain, no life, but you know life and you know sails and you know Mm-hmm.

Speaker 422:45

Bare when you are today.

Speaker 422:49

I know a place where you can get away. You go to dance floor. And here's what it's for. So co-cost.

Presenter22:59

That was Madonna and Vogue. And so, Catlamorana, there you were. You were sixteen. You were a size twenty two. Your home had rats. You'd no G C S C's or A levels, and you had, by your own admission, no friends.

Presenter23:13

Here you sit before me, a fantastically successful columnist for nearly it'll be twenty five years this year at the Times. You've published five books, you have two children, you look to be about a size ten. Oh well, twelve.

Caitlin Moran23:19

Uh

Speaker 423:19

At the times

Caitlin Moran23:19

Uh

Presenter23:26

I hate to use the word journey because it makes me feel slightly queasy. But the truth is, it's a cracker of a journey.

Presenter23:33

When you're not writing, when you're sitting with a mug of coffee looking out at the garden on your own and you are not producing a version of your thoughts for consumption, what are you thinking about yourself?

Presenter23:46

Uh

Caitlin Moran23:46

You will die soon, so keep writing. Once you start making a list of all the things that haven't been told, or the stories that haven't been told, the characters that you haven't seen, it's a lifetime's work. And I panic that I won't even get a third of the way through it before I die of lung cancer, because I can't stop smoking.

Caitlin Moran24:05

Yeah.

Presenter24:06

Do you feel like a survivor? Do you feel like you've survived something?

Caitlin Moran24:10

No, because my, you know, I know from going out there and meeting people, and the reason that I write these things is because this is how most people are. You know, we are all fragile things. We fake it till we make it. You know, we present these public sort of faces, but underneath we're all dealing with massive things. Everyone's got problems. So, you know, everyone is surviving. You just try and do the most fun version of that. Always look for the joy in it. Because once you don't believe in an afterlife and you realize how very short and tiny life is, then you realise the ultimate purpose of life is to experience as much joy as possible. That's the thing that we can do. That is the thing that elevates us above everything else on this planet. So it's not about surviving. It's about trying to cram in as much joy as possible.

Caitlin Moran24:48

Yeah.

Presenter24:48

Uh

Caitlin Moran24:48

Uh

Presenter24:48

What were the smoking, by the way?

Caitlin Moran24:50

Yeah.

Presenter24:50

Uh

Caitlin Moran24:50

Tell me about your name.

Presenter24:50

Tell me about your next piece of music. What are we going to hear?

Caitlin Moran24:52

Yeah. Oh well, well I suppose that sort of follows off what we're talking about, David Bowie.

Caitlin Moran24:57

Oh god, he was just elegant. And at one point, he was so thin that his teeth looked fat, like kind of an extraordinary-looking man. Rock and Roll Suicide is what I love about this, again, it's about being useful. When he died, everybody said the same thing. I felt he was my friend. I felt he came into my bedroom and told me it was going to be okay. Rock and Roll Suicide is designed for you to start miming away to it, looking at yourself in the mirror, thinking, I look really tragic and wrecked. And by the time the chorus comes in, you'll be miming so brilliantly. You'll be enjoying being David Bowie so much that you'll change your mind and go, well, I might as well live.

Speaker 425:29

Shepbricks was snarling as she stumbled across the road.

Speaker 425:36

But the day breaks instead, so you hurry home.

Speaker 425:43

Don't let the sun blast your shadow Don't let the milk flow rub your mind They're so natural, religiously unkind

Speaker 425:55

Oh no, love, you're not alone.

Presenter25:59

That was David Bowie and Rock and Roll Suicide. Catelyn Moran, your sitcom Raised by Wolves won the prestigious Rose Dore Award back in 2016, just last year. You've described it as a sympathetic portrayal of the working classes. How much does feeling in touch with where you came from seem important to you now? Because as you say, you live the life of a metropolitan elite star, journalist and writer.

Caitlin Moran26:25

Yes. Uh what's the best way to put this? Um

Caitlin Moran26:32

Leading the life that I do and living where I do.

Caitlin Moran26:36

means that it's impossible not to write constantly about being working class and cancel the states and weird kids and the people you don't get written about.

Presenter26:45

Let me just talk you seem you say it's impossible because what? Because you feel that

Presenter26:49

It would be what you wouldn't be doing your duty or you would be unfortunately.

Caitlin Moran26:54

Because living in sort of media middle class Oxbridge white male London, you are constantly living in a world where everyone presumes that's normal, that that's not a thing, that that's neutral, that that's the baseline of human experience, and that anything outside that is other that needs to be specially commissioned or kind of like, oh, now we'll go and take a look at these lives for 20 minutes underneath this rock in a kind of Attenborough way, and not understand that those lives, the working class lives, lives on benefits, weird kids, autodidacts, you know, kind of the humor, the intelligence, the brilliance, the funny, the joy, the life, is the normal experience. That's how most people are. And yet those lives are treated like a special case.

Presenter27:30

I wanted to ask you about that because according to the most recent and their government figures, 43% of newspaper columnists are privately educated. Seven percent of the population, as we know, is privately educated.

Caitlin Moran27:39

It's probably not.

Presenter27:41

Writing in the Times. Do you often feel then like a sort of exotic

Caitlin Moran27:45

Well, they don't treat me like that and they have been amazing. I mean my god, to be given a column in a national newspaper at the age of 17 and they have been incredibly supportive for the last 25 years. They basically hired a mad child in a hat from Wolverhampton and gave her a space in a national newspaper. But I am very aware. I keep constantly being told, why don't you write for The Guardian instead? Because those readers know this stuff. I'm writing to judges. You know, I'm writing to MPs. I'm writing to people whose minds I want to change. You know, I should be showing them what this life is like.

Presenter28:14

Let's have some more music, Cat Lamoran. It is time for your seventh.

Caitlin Moran28:17

We've got 30 seconds more of Class War, haven't we? Because it's Pulp's Common People. Brit Pop was an incredible time to be a teenager. And when Pulp put out Common People, which is this brilliant pay on to kind of like middle-class tourists coming to live a working-class life and to thinking it's all fun and not realizing the desperation that lies underneath it, I just thought I am living through an amazing time. And there's nothing like this happening now. You don't get working-class bands singing about life in Britain today. And I think maybe if we did have a band like Pulp doing songs like Common People, we might not have Brexited. That is what culture is for. It is a release for our Brexited feelings. She came from Greece, she had a thirst for love.

Speaker 328:50

She studied sculpture at St. Martin's College, as well I.

Speaker 329:02

She told me that the dam was loaded

Speaker 329:05

I said in that case I'm at ruin Coca-Cola, she said fine.

Speaker 329:10

Uh

Speaker 329:12

And then in 30 seconds time she said I wanna live like common people I wanna do whatever

Presenter29:22

Common people do. Uh

Speaker 329:23

Uh

Presenter29:23

That was pulp and common people. Tell me, Catelyn Moran.

Speaker 329:23

That was

Presenter29:26

You were brought up, as you told me earlier today, with no rules, no boundaries, no heating. And what sort of mother are you?

Presenter29:35

Ooh.

Caitlin Moran29:36

Um very present to the point that they would they would be quite annoyed about that, I suspect. I'm kind of I'm there in the morning, I'm there in the evening, I sort of turn everything down, I'm kind of I just like hanging out with them, they're really really funny and once we got past the Pepper Pig stage and we could start watching Propertelly, once they got into Seinfeld and Marvin Gaye, they were just delightful people to hang out with.

Presenter29:56

Very surprisingly I have read you describe yourself as an obsessive gardener.

Caitlin Moran30:01

Oh, yes.

Caitlin Moran30:03

Well again, it's about playing with time, isn't it? Like when you create a garden, you're making it in the present, but you're imagining the future. As you plant something, you're like, this is what it will look like in spring when it's covered in blossom, and then in summer the leaves will cover everything. Then in autumn, this will be bright red and on fire, and in winter, then I will have berries. So it's like time travel. You're conducting a symphony. There's a rhythm to it and a music to it and a magic to it that is transcendent over everything else. And, you know, and I like the smell of earth.

Presenter30:03

Uh

Presenter30:29

So, um, given that we know you are an adept gardener, or at least an enthusiastic one, you will tame your island, will you? You will be growing things, you will be.

Caitlin Moran30:35

Well, I've been thinking about this. I mean, I just need to ask about the layout and the sort of topography of this. Now, is it one island that we all end up on?

Presenter30:42

No, it's not. You are well on your own. You can see nobody. The island is big enough to adventure around, but not so big that you might get lost.

Caitlin Moran30:50

So I can't swim to like Bruce Springsteen's Island and borrow his records then? Like kind of. You'd have to beat me to it.

Presenter30:57

Yeah.

Caitlin Moran30:58

I tell you what, there's gonna be a lot of bodies in that sea going towards Springsteen's Island. Where are you going? Springsteen's Island! I want to touch his pecs. Rock me, Bruce.

Presenter31:07

Yeah.

Caitlin Moran31:07

Tell me

Presenter31:07

What about your last piece of music, Catelyn?

Caitlin Moran31:09

Amory's gotta work. She's just talking about why work is great, and this for me, in a nutshell, is why art is fantastic and why pop is fantastic. She's turned what we would all just simply moan about on a bus into just the funkiest thing ever. And halfway through, you're like, yeah, work! Work is amazing! Work makes me dance! Work makes me shake my booty. Thank you for work.

Speaker 431:31

It tastes like

Speaker 431:33

Sometimes it's gonna be afraid of like

Speaker 431:35

Sometimes you never feel pain like this. Sometimes you got it work all for me.

Speaker 431:41

Cause when you feel alone, my

Speaker 431:43

And you can't get another whole one

Speaker 431:45

That's when you know you're close. Sometimes you gotta work all for it.

Speaker 431:51

Woke up in the morning

Speaker 431:53

It's another county day, but that never mattered too much to me.

Presenter32:00

That was Amory and Gotta Work. Uh Catelyn, it's time for me to give you the books that I give to everybody. I'm going to give you a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you get to take another book along with them. What is your book gonna be?

Caitlin Moran32:11

Yeah, I'll not be using the Bible or the Shakespeare. I will just simply be rereading The Diary of Adrian Mole over and over and over again. It's working class, it's written by a woman, and it's line by line, I think, the funniest book ever written. Particularly the bit where Adrian's mum goes, There's only one thing more boring than other people's problems, Adrian, and that's other people's dreams.

Presenter32:13

Uh

Caitlin Moran32:31

Absolutely true. That's your book, and a luxury item. It's not been invented yet, but I'm confident that you'll be able to personally cobble it together yourself. I would like a solar-powered laptop.

Presenter32:39

It is not connected to the internet. It doesn't have any search ability on it. It is simply really a sort of jazzed up word processor.

Caitlin Moran32:41

Yeah.

Caitlin Moran32:46

Yes, I just want to be able to write because

Caitlin Moran32:49

I can write characters and I'd be able to talk to them. I wouldn't be lonely.

Presenter32:51

I will even give you one of those little jelly covers so as the sand doesn't get on the keyboard. How's that? That's really thoughtful because I hadn't thought of that. Which one of these eight tracks, if you had to save one from the waves, which one would it be?

Caitlin Moran33:05

I think it'd be the Beatles.

Presenter33:06

I just find them really comforting. Catlin Moran, thank you very much for letting us see your Desert Island discs. My pleasure.

Presenter33:52

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website: bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.

Caitlin Moran34:26

This is the BBC.