In conversation with Caitlin Moran: Raised By Wolves, horny teenage girls and working class telly
RadioTimes.com met the outspoken feminist on the set of her Channel 4 comedy - and she didn't disappoint
Other characters – like single mum Della – have been penned with artistic license. The original intention was to set the sitcom in the 90s. When they decided to make it contemporary instead, they realised Della would be their age. So she shares Caitlin and Caroline’s love of Russell Crowe, Gene Hackman movies and Chris Packham.
Caitlin: “It got to the point where our script editor said: you’ve got to stop going on about Chris Packham. It’s looking really weird now.”
Caroline: “We based her on Ripley in Alien. She’s as much a sergeant major as she is a parent.”
Caitlin: “Most sitcom mums are forever sighing: oh daddy, when will you stop being so wacky. Or being put upon and subsumed by the kids. Sitcom mums never get to be whole women. Della’s not like that at all. She’s a single mum with five kids but she gets on with her life.”
The Morans managed to find two photographs of the house they grew up in and showed them to the set designers. So Germaine and Aretha’s home is exactly as they remember it: the kitchen crammed with giant catering tins of baked beans and slabs of no-frills cheese; the bedrooms crammed with several bunks apiece and lovingly wallpapered with posters. Well, almost exactly.
Caroline: “There’s not as much mess. Because people actually have to work in there you can’t have the floor covered in anything and everything for health and safety reasons.”
Caitlin: “Also, our parents were breeding Alsatians so the house was full of puppies, and we’d regularly have to hose down the floor with Dettol. So this is a more hygienic version of our house.”
But while they may be “Midlands twats” – as Della says with characteristic bluntness – Raised by Wolves is not Wolverhampton’s answer to Shameless. Germaine and Aretha are working-class intellectuals: fiercely intelligent, witty, politically engaged. Their council house doubles as a library – as did the Moran's.
Caitlin: “Every single wall was covered with very badly made bookcases made by our dad, and filled with every kind of book. That was the very best thing about our childhood: the sheer amount of books that were in our house and the variety.”
From the outset she’s been keen to emphasise that there’s more to Raised by Wolves than wince-inducing gags.
"Half the hoo-ha that happened over Benefits Street was because it was the first time we'd seen the working-classes on television,” she told RadioTimes.com last year. “There's been Benefits Street and Shameless and apart from that nothing. And culture should be a mirror to what is happening in the country. If you're working class and you look at television, the mirror doesn't work. You do not see yourself there unless you're a drug dealer riding around on a tiny bicycle, having sex on wastelands and being a bit dodgy.
“Obviously there are those people on council estates but there are also fat, shy 15 year-old girls reading Orwell and Dostoyevsky but you never see that. You presume automatically that everybody on benefits is hard and lairy and scary – and they're not."
An estate with a difference
So what do the rest of the Moran clan make of their big sisters’ first foray into TV?
Caroline: “They’re stoked, aren’t they? Although some of them are a bit narked that we’ve nicked funny lines that they said.”
Caitlin: “Yes, I’m sure at Christmas there’ll be a reckoning. Everyone will bring out their paperwork: well, I observe that this joke, which I made on 17th September 1997, has been used here. I hereby invoice you £10.”
“When all eight of us are round a table, you wouldn’t be able to make out any words because we talk twice as fast when we’re altogether.”
As if to prove it, they start jabbering over each other (again), merrily reminiscing about the festive quiz Caitlin always forces her siblings to play, and the time Caroline threw a potato at her and it prompted their brothers to invent a game called “bad potato”....and RadioTimes.com leaves them to it.
Raised by Wolves begins on Monday 16th March on Channel 4 at 10pm
