Since undertaking bikini duties as last year’s eye candy on I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! she has been called many things — mostly ‘stupid’, ‘brainless’, ‘dumb’ and ‘the most hated celeb in the jungle’.
But she tells me she’s wept buckets over these ‘misconceptions’ and that, actually, she’s very deep.
Misunderstood? Helen Flanagan said she is actually very deep and she has cried over the misconceptions about her
How dare they? Well, frankly, she does herself no favours when it comes to challenging the prevailing impression that she has all the depth of a paddling pool.
What kind of woman, you may ask, posts online a picture of herself wearing a lacy black bra and holding a gun to her head days after the Sandy Hook school shootings in the U.S. — which claimed the lives of 20 children and six adults — to make a joke about suffering from a hangover?
The tasteless pictures appeared the very day of the first funerals of gunman Adam Lanza’s victims and Helen’s gaffe reportedly put in jeopardy a £1 million modelling deal with Ultimo lingerie.
Helen then enraged animal lovers by posting a photo of a cat, whose ears and nose had been removed to save it from cancer, to illustrate how she felt when her Manchester City soccer star boyfriend Scott Sinclair went out without her.
And let’s not forget the Welsh, who were offended when Helen tweeted she was ‘bored’ living there when Scott was playing for Swansea.
The day we meet at a Manchester hotel for Helen to dispel these cruel assaults on her intelligence, she is upset over the way her latest ‘blonde moment’ has been portrayed in the Press.
She tweeted that she had almost reversed over boyfriend Scott in her Land Rover after dropping him at Manchester Airport, not realising he was still unloading luggage from the boot. It was an attempt, she says, at self- deprecating humour but again it misfired.
Helen joined the cast of Coronation Street aged
nine, left, but when she became a teenager regularly had to pose in
raunchy outfits
‘The thing is, when I do something silly, I try to make a joke of myself. Then it’s like “oh she’s not the brightest girl” and it really upsets me.
‘Yes, it was very irresponsible for me to put out that picture of me with the gun, and I apologised for that. It was very silly, but it was relating to a hangover. I didn’t mean to upset anyone. I just didn’t think,’ says Helen, whose gaffe necessitated a tearful mea culpa on the ITV Daybreak sofa by way of damage limitation.
‘After the massacre happened, I thought: “How can there be this evil in the world?” Then you put it out of your mind, because it’s too upsetting, too heartbreaking.
‘I’m the most sensitive girl. I have the biggest heart so the backlash and all the hateful comments really affected me. People make mistakes, I made a mistake.
‘I would never set out to hurt anyone, but I’m quite impulsive. I don’t think before I act and it’s always got me into trouble, but all the criticism feels a bit unjust.
'When I chose that cat picture, I didn’t realise it didn’t have ears and was impaired. I just thought the cat looked really scary and funny.
‘My boyfriend was going out without me and I was just making a silly joke about feeling like an abandoned cat. It was completely harmless and the fuss that caused made me so angry.
Helen provoked uproar when she Tweeted the picture of herself with a gun to her head after the U.S. school massacre
‘So I was bored in Wales, who cares? I wasn’t criticising the country, Wales is lovely. I just felt lonely and bored, because Scott was away so much playing football.’
Helen has agreed to meet me to talk about what she sees as the real reason for these regrettable lapses. Aged 16, she was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, while being treated for an eating disorder. She has since been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder.
She takes medication and regularly sees a psychologist, but says these conditions have had a devastating effect on her life — leading to the breakdown which forced her to quit Coronation Street in February last year after 11 years of playing Rosie, Sally and Kevin Webster’s troubled daughter.
It’s at this point that Helen kicks off her 4in stiletto boots and reclines on the hotel couch, talking into the middle distance as if in the presence of a shrink.
Indeed, it doesn’t take an amateur psychologist to work out that growing up in the public eye on a popular British soap — she joined the cast aged nine — took quite some toll on her fragile psyche.
Helen was so ill and depressed by the time she quit, she fantasised about crashing her car on the way to work to end it all.
Helen Flanagan said she and her footballer boyfriend Scott Sinclair plan to start a family soon
Helen was just 13 when she had her first screen kiss. Her TV character quickly graduated to under-age sex.
Rosie then went from rebellious ‘Goth’ to scheming Lolita and minx. She seduced her older male teacher, then her factory boss. There were countless scenes which required Helen to wear corsets and plunging bras.
‘When I was about 16, all these storylines suddenly happened with Rosie doing all these sexy scenes and I really didn’t understand any of it. I was clueless,’ says Helen, the third of four children born into a strict Roman Catholic working-class family.
‘My character seemed to change the minute I grew breasts. I went overnight from a 32AA to a 32E and at times I really struggled with it. I was willing to do the scenes because, at the time, it seemed like fun and what 16-year-old girl doesn’t want to think: “Oh, I’m sexy.”
‘But it also felt really weird because my family were very strict, I went to an all-girls school and at home I had the highest morals. Rosie may have been very promiscuous, but I was the complete opposite.’
So it was upsetting when strangers — who could not differentiate between Rosie and Helen — called her a ‘slag’ in the street and male fans tried to grab her when she went shopping in Manchester.
Meanwhile, every aspect of her appearance, every acne pimple, was scrutinised by millions.
It is perhaps no surprise that Helen developed an eating disorder at 16, dropping to 6st 10lb through a regime of rigid food control and obsessive exercise.
‘I would swim for two hours in the pool and if I didn’t do my lengths I would get very worked up,’ says Helen, who from the age of 13 attended a private school after being bullied at her previous state school.
‘I remember going on holiday and feeling I didn’t want to grow boobs. I didn’t like it at all. I wanted to be the thinnest girl at school.
‘Once, on Corrie, I had to do this really sexy scene with loads of dialogue. I’d hardly been sleeping and couldn’t concentrate so I was struggling to remember the words. I was wearing a bra and knickers, feeling very self-conscious, going through really bad depression. I felt knackered and just burst into tears. It was too much pressure.
‘I’m a very intense person, things get to me. I felt people were taking the mickey out of me. I felt Rosie had become a cartoon character and I wasn’t being taken seriously.
‘At times, when I was asked to wear silly costumes, I felt a bit degraded and demoralised and there were times when I ran off set because I couldn’t stand it any more.’
Helen was treated for her eating disorder and ADD at the Priory clinic, but says she stopped taking her medication when a fellow workmate joked that she took so many pills she rattled. Moods veering from one extreme to another, she fell out with her parents, Julia and Paul, and at 17 moved into a flat with her first boyfriend.
Despite being called the most hated contestant ever on I'm A Celebrity... Helen said it was the 'best time of her life'
Helen was voted to do a record number of trials during the programme
In her misery, Helen even had her own Britney Spears meltdown moment. Although she stopped short of shaving her head and waving a brolly at the paparazzi, she cut her hair short without the soap’s permission — a cardinal sin.
‘I just wanted to be myself. I wanted to get rid of this sexy image. I felt I was being laughed at,’ says Helen, who met Scott through a mutual friend when she was 19.
‘I thought people at work didn’t like me any more and considered me a drama queen, a brattish diva, but I was severely depressed. I was crying my eyes out all the time.
‘Eventually, someone at work pulled me aside and said: “I really don’t think you can do this any more,” because I was not well at all.’
After quitting Coronation Street, Helen moved to Swansea to be with Scott and concentrate on her recovery.
Having left school at 16, she planned to take the A-levels she had missed. She also dreamed of becoming a serious actress in the mould of Helena Bonham Carter and auditioned for the top London drama school RADA.
She did not win a place, so she took the next best thing — I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! Given that she felt so much conflict about her sexualised image, it seems a shame this involved returning to depressingly familiar territory.
But Helen justifies her decision by saying: ‘How come you can’t be clever and show off your body? If I can do something I really enjoy and get paid for it, how can that be stupid?
Helen said she wanted viewers to see the 'real' her on I'm A Celebrity...
She says all she wanted was for viewers to see ‘the real me’, but a girl doesn’t pack three designer bikinis (£240 each) and shower under a freezing cold waterfall without some part of her hoping it might lead to bigger and better things. Well, that was the idea anyway.
‘I have no regrets going on I’m A Celebrity. It was the best time of my life. I never thought about people hating me and voting for me to do the trials,’ says Helen, whose meltdowns prompted viewers to make her face five bush-tucker trials, including nibbling on an ostrich anus.
‘The only thing I thought about was missing my boyfriend. I’m very much in love. I was thinking: “I hope I’m not embarrassing him.”’
Indeed, while Helen was in the jungle, Scott was regularly taunted from the terraces, but — according to Helen — he had the good grace not to complain about it and told her, ‘You were amazing, babe’ on her exit.
Today, Helen insists she feels ‘blessed’, ‘fortunate’ and the ‘luckiest girl in the world’, despite her recent trials and tribulations.
She tells me that she and Scott hope to have the first of many babies next year, and that her next big ambition is to become a mother, if not a wife because Scott has yet to propose.
A clever girl might insist on a wedding ring first, but Helen says: ‘We’re both obsessed and besotted with each other. I’d be completely lost without him.
‘I find it hard to trust anyone, but I trust Scott one million per cent. I know he’d never betray me because, even though I’m strong and independent, he’s seen my fragility. He would never hurt me like that.’