Caitlin Moran: A Pop Culture Inquisition

As she prepares to release her debut novel, How to Build A Girl, I sit down with Attitude favourite – and the winner of our Honorary Gay award in 2012 – Caitlin Moran, to pick her brains on all things pop culture. And have a couple of drinks in the process…

Where will reality TV end?
“I don’t think it should. It provides us with a really useful service. If there is a class of people who want to be famous, that’s just great, because it takes the heat off the creative people. It’s perfect for me. Plus me and my kids love Joey Essex. We watched Educating Joey Essex last week, and the one thing I thought they did wrong with that was they made him go to Africa – you know, you could have just taken him to Scotland. He doesn’t need to be in the jungle with gorillas, this is a man that can’t even blow his own nose. You could just take him five streets away – a culture clash for Joey Essex could be anywhere. Just take him around fucking Waitrose.”

Who will achieve global domination first: the Beckhams or Vladimir Putin?
“The thing is, if I was writing the next Bond film, I would write that Vladimir Putin was trying to kill the Beckhams. They would be his new rival, and I would reinvent Bond. The only way that James Bond would make sense in the modern day is if he was an old school gay – it seems really weird for a straight guy to be having that much sex with so many people, whereas if it was a proper old school gay like [one from] my generation, then it would be amazing. I was watching Skyfall, and it was terrible, but the bit where he is flirting with Javier Bardem, I was thinking ‘I could fan fiction this forever’. So bring back a gay Bond, and he is protecting the Beckhams, who Putin is trying to destroy. I would watch the fuck out of that.”

What was ARTPOP all about?
“I went to see it [her gig] at the Roundhouse. I love the pig one (Swine), that was nuts. What it sounds like to me is that she has gone away and the only places that she has gone are those horrible clubs she goes to with her gay Puerto Rican backing dancers, and everyone is on ketamine and the music is going ‘woop woop’, and she is just recreating that soundtrack instead of going away and thinking. But she just looks knackered now, and like she’s running to keep up. When she first came out and she was dressing up, getting changed like three or four times a day, you were like, ‘Oh my God, this is what a pop star should be’. She’s been doing that for so long now that she should just disappear for two years, let pop reset itself, and when it’s dull again, she should come back and everyone would be like ‘Oh she’s back’. Have a little nap, and then come back with ten things as good as the people wearing pig masks.”

Madonna would knock everyone’s socks off tomorrow if she came out with…
“…me for a night. I think she needs to get pissed again and have a big party. I completely respect her for wanting to tone it down and be respectable and work hard and stuff, but you know what, how old is David Banda now? Like ten or something? You could just leave them for a couple of days, and have one mad night – come out for three days. Madonna needs to come to Glastonbury with me, we need to go to that place where they have the drag queen Olympics, and you have to run down in high heels and stuff. Imagine if I got Madonna to do that.”

Could Meryl Streep play Caitlin Moran in the Hollywood biopic?
“She could, but not as well as Dustin Hoffman, because basically, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie realised all the problems with being a woman in drag – you know, it’s the teeth, the hair and the shoes and all that kind of stuff. I had to turn down a meal with Meryl last year because I was so busy, and also it was a Saturday night and it was the semi -inals of the The X Factor. And one of my favourite things to do is to tweet all over The X Factor and be sarcastic in the hope that they will put my sarcastic tweet up by accident on the big wall. It was when she was launching The Iron Lady, she was going to have lots of women around and cook dinner for them, and all my friends went. And they were all sitting around smoking with Meryl, chatting and being lovely. I do feel some regret about that, but I had The X Factor so, swings and roundabouts.”

Nigella Lawson wins at life because…
“We did a photo shoot where she dressed up as me and I dressed up as her, and only very recently I realised I could have been Thigh-gella, because I had my thighs right out. The worst thing you can do for your ego is have Nigella dress up as you because she makes the most staggeringly beautiful you ever. Whereas I look like the worst Nigella ever – again, I just look like Tootsie. So Nigella rules at life because she is really sunny, she doesn’t give a shit, and she has a cracking rack. We don’t have Dynasty, we don’t have Joan Crawford, we have Nigella – she’s like a Dame. She has invented herself. When she wrote the first book, How To Eat, nobody had written like that before, being really chatty about food. There is a recipe that she does which is for a salted custard, and she says you know when it’s cooked because it’s as wobbly and pale as a courtesan’s inner thigh, and that’s the kind of cooking I can appreciate. Not all this coming in with forty degrees shit.”

Should Katie Hopkins be banned from a) This Morning b) Twitter c) life?
“The thing about Katie Hopkins is that everyone has a tiny wormy bit of evil about them and might be quietly thinking some of these things, but she goes all the way, and I find that wholly repulsive. I was really sad when she didn’t just come out and say a series of evil things about Peaches Geldof, same as Samantha Brick and Jan Moir, because the fact that she had to hold back on that means that she does know that she has done something wrong.  You know if I was writing a screen play, I would write about someone like Katie Hopkins, to see her redemption story – kind of like the character in my book How to Build A Girl, she starts off writing evil things for attention and then realises that it corrodes your soul. You have to make her write 1,000 words a day so she’ll realise that this is leading nowhere. You are not making the world a better place. Then I would have her finding redemption perhaps in a musical number where she just bangs on about how sorry she is.”

If you could give out one knighthood, and one damehood, who would you choose?
“The way it’s going, it would be Clare Balding, but she’s going to get one anyway, it’s in the bag. She’s the kind of woman who would have founded the British Empire. I would give one to Eddie Izzard because I love him and he is the funniest man of his generation and he was like, ‘I need to go into politics, because if I don’t, then who will?’. He has an enormous sense of responsibility and he is funny, and I fancy him. You know what, give one to Madonna. Madonna was so fun when she was living in England, and I was so sad when there was all this news that she had been done for noise pollution, and I thought amazing, but then I heard it was the staff and she was away in LA at the time. I loved it when Madonna was here, and this would make her have to come back.”

Should Bez join the join the party leaders at next year’s election debate?
“To me Bez is like UKIP. When you see someone like that, standing up and taking part in it, you realise that anyone can do this. And that’s what we need. Bring them all on. Bring on Jas Mann from Babylon Zoo and all of Bananarama, let’s make it amazing. It should be like a Punch and Judy show. I was at the Happy Mondays gig in the royal balcony, and Bez disappeared off and everyone was like ‘Where the fuck has Bez gone?’ and suddenly you could see the audience going ‘Shit!’ and then his head appeared up the side of the balcony – he had climbed up the side of the theatre and appeared. It was like seeing the Loch Ness monster appear, and his eyes are terrifying. Then I read recently that he has got into beekeeping, and someone had given him a hive – of course they have – and he stuck it on the roof of his house and there was a brilliant picture when he was standing next to the hive saying ‘I haven’t got any bees yet. I’m waiting for my bees to turn up’.

What do you have to say on the rivalry that we ship between you and Grace Dent?
“Well, when I won the Honorary Gay award, everyone else was like ‘Well done Caitlin’, and she just appeared on Twitter, 20 minutes later – clearly with a hangover, smoking a fag with her beehive over one eye, going ‘I’m googling gorilla attack delivery service’, and she was literally seeing if an enraged gorilla could be delivered to my house and attack me and take my face off, at which point I laughed for about four and a half hours. You know what, I haven’t seen Grace much recently, but we are in such a coalition, that whenever we are invited to award ceremonies or anything nice, we both just stand there and take it in turns to go, ‘You know what? We should basically be just working as waitresses, or in a brothel in Blackpool’ – because of our backgrounds and our appearances. And Grace is the main person that I watch and try and steal from, I always see what she’s doing and go ‘Well if Grace has done that, then I can do this’. We are very Alexis and Crystal. We will end up one day – probably at the Attitude Awards – in a lily pond, tearing into each other’s wigs. No, my love for Grace is endless, and I have only said that because I know it will annoy her.”

Caitlin Moran’s debut novel How To Build A Girl is published on Thursday July 3. You can read an additional interview with her in the August issue of Attitude, out July 18.