Stuck into a second bottle of red, Charlotte Church utters an unprintable
oath, takes another slug of vino and turns her glassy eyes towards me –
sending the bottle crashing to the floor.
Okay, I made all that up. The former voice of an angel, who is now 10 days shy
of her 21st birthday, is in fact sitting demurely across from me, sipping
tea and, for a few minutes at least, refraining from profaning.
To judge from reports of the French skiing holiday Church and her rugby-player
boyfriend, Gavin Henson, recently enjoyed (“Gav’n’Char on piste for 9
hours”, one headline read), she still knows how to binge for Britain. Yet,
as she prepares for the second series of her Friday-night Channel 4 chat
show, the woman who once sang for popes and presidents, and has an estimated
£6.5m in the bank for her trouble, now knows, as Bowie put it, when to go
out and when to stay in. Today, the effing-and-blinding,
swigging-and-ligging Char is nowhere to be seen. Well, not the boozing one,
at any rate. Mind you, she could be as sober as a judge and as pure as a
nun, and controversy would stalk. It comes, she says, with the territory:
“The general public always say, ‘But you’re so nice’, like they expect me to
be walking round Tesco hammered.” When she made the pilot for her series,
Church was persuaded to include a sketch that involved her calling the Pope
a Nazi and smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary. A journalist sneaked onto
the sealed set and outrage ensued. One leading Catholic publisher banned her
products, asking its customers to join it in “praying for this troubled
young woman”. Reminded of the episode, the young woman in question shakes
herself out of her prim-and-proper slumber.
“A lot of Christian websites I did well on,” she splutters, “didn’t sell my
records any more. So that was a loss of earnings. It’s fine when it’s
tittle-tattle, like ‘Charlotte drank 10 sambucas’, but when it gets serious,
like that, there’s nothing you can say.” Except to call the Pope a Nazi.
“Why do they portray me as this?” she continues. “Now they’re making Gavin
out to be a pisshead, which is probably my fault. [Henson was omitted from
the lineup for the opening match of Wales’s Six Nations campaign; insiders
say that the wrong sorts of headline hurt his chances.] Usually, it’s
ever-suffering Gav and the foul-mouthed, lager-lout monster that is me.”
Does she think she has a drink problem? “If I have,” she zaps back, not quite
answering the question, “then 80% of the young population of Britain does.
Yeah, we all know the dangers, and I do it. I go out and get drunk to have a
chat – well, not a chat, because your chat’s shit when you’re drunk – but so
I can have a dance with the girls, have a laugh. And 95% of the time, unless
someone really, really provokes me, I’m not confrontational.” It’s the 5%
that gets her into trouble – much of it occurred when, with majestic
abandon, Church turned 18, slept with a couple of kiss’n’tell wrong ’uns and
hit the clubs of Cardiff with a will, and a wallet containing more of her
hard-earned cash than she’d previously had access to. That period continues
to colour people’s perceptions, even if, as she argues, the reality today is
different. “I used to go out and, yes, sometimes we’d get in arguments with
another group of girls, because they’d start on me, like, ‘Who the f*** do
you think you are?’ ‘Well, nobody – I was only having a dance, love. What’s
your problem?’ Now, I’ve changed as I’ve grown up, but, hey, that’s not such
a good story. No, we’ll stick with how you were when you were 18.”
And the potty mouth? “It’s just a thing that happens. You’re in the pub [her
mother owns one in Cardiff]; everyone’s at it. I like swearing. I don’t want
to get political, because I’m not, not me, but I think the reason people
have a problem with it is because I’m a young girl, and it’s not ‘fitting’.
Jonathan Ross says the c-word, that’s fine. He’s an old man” – ouch – “he
can do what he wants. It was supposed to be one of my new-year resolutions
to cut it down, but I can’t. They just fly out.” Tabloid and TV Britain
quickly became hooked on the thrill of Little Miss Perfect cussing and
carousing, as years of curtseying at papal audiences and warbling Panis
Angelicus came to a conclusive and messy end in 2004. As did her career as a
classical singer. Church wanted to be a pop star, and released Tissues and
Issues, a thin album of disco, power ballads and candy pop. Her image
received a makeover: vampishly soft-porn publicity shots went up as giant
posters, provoking graffiti artists to horrible puns. Compared with her
earlier releases, the record was a flop. Enter, at an opportune moment,
Channel 4.
With an average viewing figure of 1.9m, The Charlotte Church Show did
sufficiently good business last autumn to be recommissioned for two further
series. Church may not be as quick-witted an interviewer as Ross, or have
his killer instinct, but neither is she as cutting. The real key to the
show’s success is the sense it conveys of a presenter who’s not, frankly,
that bothered about whether it works or not. “I’m not wildly ambitious,” she
claims. “I don’t think it’s going to power me on to huge stardom, to
dominate the world, do movies. I don’t want that. I’ve got my life, my
fella; I love my family. When my manager phones up and says ‘Okay, you’ve
got a concert’ or something, I’m like, ‘Oh, f***, do I have to?’ I’m
ecstatic that the show was recommissioned, but if it hadn’t been, I’ve got a
lot of money, I’m very happy and my happiness does not depend on my career.
I might have gone, ‘That’s a shame – I was enjoying that’ .. . but I would
also have gone, ‘Who cares?’ ” When the show is in production, she rehearses
it one day and films it the next, both in London, but returns each day to
Cardiff. “I like to go home,” she says, “discuss my day with Gav, see how
his day’s gone, have a nice clutch – rather than staying in some hotel on my
own, watching rubbish.” The show’s other fascinating quality is its
portrayal of a celebrity on the other side of the transaction, interviewing
rather than being grilled, and lobbing choice insults in the direction of
other celebs. Script-editing sessions can be fraught. “There have been a lot
of jokes about people I like, and I’ve said, ‘ I’m not saying that.’ I try
to be reasonably moral, but I also try to remember that it’s supposed to be
fun and frivolous.
“During the first series, it always seemed to be about Paris Hilton, Lindsay
Lohan and Heather Mills. With the first two, I pretty much agreed with that,
but that’s only from my reading about them.” And here she lets out a knowing
chuckle. “With Heather Mills, I started feeling really bad for her, but then
the writers would say, ‘Well, apparently she’s been offered £40m and she’s
not taking it. Don’t you think she’s a greedy bitch?’ You feel a bit better
about it then.”
The most infamous car-crash moment occurred when Church, for her customary
show-closing duet, got up on stage with a seemingly sozzled Amy Winehouse to
perform Michael Jackson’s Beat It. Winehouse slurred her way through a
rivetingly shambolic rendition, to the visible alarm of her co-singer. “The
day before, at rehearsal,” Church recalls, “she was a bit eccentric, but she
didn’t seem drunk. I’d said, ‘Which bit do you want to sing?’ And she’d
gone, ‘Whatever – it’s only a knees-up, innit?’ And she sang it a bit
strange, but I thought, ‘She’ll tighten that up; she’s just being a bit
stylistic.’ ” By showtime the following day, with two takes abandoned and
the audience getting lairy, Church was close to panic. “The director was
going, ‘Okay, reset the cameras’, and I was like, ‘F***ing hurry up, because
if she hears what the audience is saying, she’s going to go, ‘F*** this. I’m
off.’”
Church doesn’t relate this censoriously, but you get the strong impression
that, nights on the piste and all, the woman who signed her first record
deal aged 11, who dumped her manager when she was still a teen and who has
again put off gaining access to her trust fund until she is 25 (“What do I
need it for? I have my allowance”) has an old and professional head on those
young shoulders. Suddenly, she looks wistful, as if aware of that weight,
and returns to the subject of the skiing holiday. “We didn’t have a clue
there was a reporter trailing us. We thought we’d got away with it – I
booked the holiday on the internet, under a different name.”
Later, out of the blue, she says: “I still don’t know who I am, what I’m
about. But I’m young. I’m still learning.”
Who tells her when she’s getting it wrong, I ask. “My nana,” she replies.
“When I told her I was coming up to do this interview, she said, ‘Watch what
you say then, Char. I’m fed up reading about stuff.’
“And Gavin will always say, ‘All right now, shhh: quiet time now.’ ” Can you
imagine how Church reacts to that?
The Charlotte Church Show begins on Channel 4 on February 23
Stuck into a second bottle of red, Charlotte Church utters an unprintable
oath, takes another slug of vino and turns her glassy eyes towards me –
sending the bottle crashing to the floor.
Okay, I made all that up. The former voice of an angel, who is now 10 days shy
of her 21st birthday, is in fact sitting demurely across from me, sipping
tea and, for a few minutes at least, refraining from profaning.
To judge from reports of the French skiing holiday Church and her rugby-player
boyfriend, Gavin Henson, recently enjoyed (“Gav’n’Char on piste for 9
hours”, one headline read), she still knows how to binge for Britain. Yet,
as she prepares for the second series of her Friday-night Channel 4 chat
show, the woman who once sang for popes and presidents, and has an estimated
£6.5m in the bank for her trouble, now knows, as Bowie put it, when to go
out and when to stay in. Today, the effing-and-blinding,
swigging-and-ligging Char is nowhere to be seen. Well, not the boozing one,
at any rate. Mind you, she could be as sober as a judge and as pure as a
nun, and controversy would stalk. It comes, she says, with the territory:
“The general public always say, ‘But you’re so nice’, like they expect me to
be walking round Tesco hammered.” When she made the pilot for her series,
Church was persuaded to include a sketch that involved her calling the Pope
a Nazi and smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary. A journalist sneaked onto
the sealed set and outrage ensued. One leading Catholic publisher banned her
products, asking its customers to join it in “praying for this troubled
young woman”. Reminded of the episode, the young woman in question shakes
herself out of her prim-and-proper slumber.
“A lot of Christian websites I did well on,” she splutters, “didn’t sell my
records any more. So that was a loss of earnings. It’s fine when it’s
tittle-tattle, like ‘Charlotte drank 10 sambucas’, but when it gets serious,
like that, there’s nothing you can say.” Except to call the Pope a Nazi.
“Why do they portray me as this?” she continues. “Now they’re making Gavin
out to be a pisshead, which is probably my fault. [Henson was omitted from
the lineup for the opening match of Wales’s Six Nations campaign; insiders
say that the wrong sorts of headline hurt his chances.] Usually, it’s
ever-suffering Gav and the foul-mouthed, lager-lout monster that is me.”
Does she think she has a drink problem? “If I have,” she zaps back, not quite
answering the question, “then 80% of the young population of Britain does.
Yeah, we all know the dangers, and I do it. I go out and get drunk to have a
chat – well, not a chat, because your chat’s shit when you’re drunk –
but so I can have a dance with the girls, have a laugh. And 95% of the time,
unless someone really, really provokes me, I’m not confrontational.” It’s
the 5% that gets her into trouble – much of it occurred when, with
majestic abandon, Church turned 18, slept with a couple of kiss’n’tell wrong
’uns and hit the clubs of Cardiff with a will, and a wallet containing more
of her hard-earned cash than she’d previously had access to. That period
continues to colour people’s perceptions, even if, as she argues, the
reality today is different. “I used to go out and, yes, sometimes we’d get
in arguments with another group of girls, because they’d start on me, like,
‘Who the f*** do you think you are?’ ‘Well, nobody –
I was only having a dance, love. What’s your problem?’ Now, I’ve changed as
I’ve grown up, but, hey, that’s not such a good story. No, we’ll stick with
how you were when you were 18.”
And the potty mouth? “It’s just a thing that happens. You’re in the pub [her
mother owns one in Cardiff]; everyone’s at it. I like swearing. I don’t want
to get political, because I’m not, not me, but I think the reason people
have a problem with it is because I’m a young girl, and it’s not ‘fitting’.
Jonathan Ross says the c-word, that’s fine. He’s an old man” –
ouch – “he can do what he wants. It was supposed to be one of my
new-year resolutions to cut it down, but I can’t. They just fly out.”
Tabloid and TV Britain quickly became hooked on the thrill of Little Miss
Perfect cussing and carousing, as years of curtseying at papal audiences and
warbling Panis Angelicus came to a conclusive and messy end in 2004. As did
her career as a classical singer. Church wanted to be a pop star, and
released Tissues and Issues, a thin album of disco, power ballads and candy
pop. Her image received a makeover: vampishly soft-porn publicity shots went
up as giant posters, provoking graffiti artists to horrible puns. Compared
with her earlier releases, the record was a flop. Enter, at an opportune
moment, Channel 4.
With an average viewing figure of 1.9m, The Charlotte Church Show did
sufficiently good business last autumn to be recommissioned for two further
series. Church may not be as quick-witted an interviewer as Ross, or have
his killer instinct, but neither is she as cutting. The real key to the
show’s success is the sense it conveys of a presenter who’s not, frankly,
that bothered about whether it works or not. “I’m not wildly ambitious,” she
claims. “I don’t think it’s going to power me on to huge stardom, to
dominate the world, do movies. I don’t want that. I’ve got my life, my
fella; I love my family. When my manager phones up and says ‘Okay, you’ve
got a concert’ or something, I’m like, ‘Oh, f***, do I have to?’ I’m
ecstatic that the show was recommissioned, but if it hadn’t been, I’ve got a
lot of money, I’m very happy and my happiness does not depend on my career.
I might have gone, ‘That’s a shame – I was enjoying that’
.. . but I would also have gone, ‘Who cares?’ ” When the show is in
production, she rehearses it one day and films it the next, both in London,
but returns each day to Cardiff. “I like to go home,” she says, “discuss my
day with Gav, see how his day’s gone, have a nice clutch – rather
than staying in some hotel on my own, watching rubbish.” The show’s other
fascinating quality is its portrayal of a celebrity on the other side of the
transaction, interviewing rather than being grilled, and lobbing choice
insults in the direction of other celebs. Script-editing sessions can be
fraught. “There have been a lot of jokes about people I like, and I’ve said,
‘ I’m not saying that.’ I try to be reasonably moral, but I also try to
remember that it’s supposed to be fun and frivolous.
“During the first series, it always seemed to be about Paris Hilton, Lindsay
Lohan and Heather Mills. With the first two, I pretty much agreed with that,
but that’s only from my reading about them.” And here she lets out a knowing
chuckle. “With Heather Mills, I started feeling really bad for her, but then
the writers would say, ‘Well, apparently she’s been offered £40m and she’s
not taking it. Don’t you think she’s a greedy bitch?’ You feel a bit better
about it then.”
The most infamous car-crash moment occurred when Church, for her customary
show-closing duet, got up on stage with a seemingly sozzled Amy Winehouse to
perform Michael Jackson’s Beat It. Winehouse slurred her way through a
rivetingly shambolic rendition, to the visible alarm of her co-singer. “The
day before, at rehearsal,” Church recalls, “she was a bit eccentric, but she
didn’t seem drunk. I’d said, ‘Which bit do you want to sing?’ And she’d
gone, ‘Whatever – it’s only a knees-up, innit?’ And she sang it a
bit strange, but I thought, ‘She’ll tighten that up; she’s just being a bit
stylistic.’ ” By showtime the following day, with two takes abandoned and
the audience getting lairy, Church was close to panic. “The director was
going, ‘Okay, reset the cameras’, and I was like, ‘F***ing hurry up, because
if she hears what the audience is saying, she’s going to go, ‘F*** this. I’m
off.’”
Church doesn’t relate this censoriously, but you get the strong impression
that, nights on the piste and all, the woman who signed her first record
deal aged 11, who dumped her manager when she was still a teen and who has
again put off gaining access to her trust fund until she is 25 (“What
do I need it for? I have my allowance”) has an old and professional head on
those young shoulders. Suddenly, she looks wistful, as if aware of that
weight, and returns to the subject of the skiing holiday. “We didn’t have a
clue there was a reporter trailing us. We thought we’d got away with it –
I booked the holiday on the internet, under a different name.”
Later, out of the blue, she says: “I still don’t know who I am, what I’m
about. But I’m young. I’m still learning.”
Who tells her when she’s getting it wrong, I ask. “My nana,” she replies.
“When I told her I was coming up to do this interview, she said, ‘Watch what
you say then, Char. I’m fed up reading about stuff.’
“And Gavin will always say, ‘All right now, shhh: quiet time now.’ ” Can you
imagine how Church reacts to that?
The Charlotte Church Show begins on Channel 4 on February 23
