Caitlin Moran’s Edinburgh Book Festival appearance entered a new dimension when a spooky version of her former ego manifested herself in the audience. Step forward actress Helen Monks, who had hotfooted across Edinburgh from her role in a Fringe stage show to listen to the feminist author and columnist.
Monks plays a young Moran (“15 years old, 15 stone and verbally incontinent”) in new TV sitcom Raised by Wolves, the semi-autobiographical reimagining of the writer growing up on a housing estate in Wolverhampton.
Moran, 38, said Monks (who plays Pip Archer in Radio 4 soap The Archers) proved a winner from the start when she turned up for auditions carrying a fat-suit. “I was a fat teenager, and Helen is quite slight, but there she was, with my tits and arse in a bag.”
Rising from her seat, Monks agreed that she had suffered for her art in the sitcom pilot, which is broadcast on Channel 4 in October. “They spent a day endlessly filming me eating a cheese sandwich: two slices of cheese with a cheese filling in the middle. Oddly, it didn’t put me off cheese.”
