BBC turned down Caitlin Moran's C4 sitcom Raised By Wolves
How to be a Woman author wrote her feminist bestseller because she was so incensed by the BBC's rejection of her female sitcom
Channel 4's forthcoming comedy based on Caitlin Moran's early life, Raised by Wolves, was initially turned down by the BBC, RadioTimes can reveal.
But the rejection of the script, which she wrote with her sister Caroline, inspired her to write her best-selling memoir How to Be a Woman. “We went to the BBC, and they said: oh, we’ve already got a sitcom with women in this year so we can’t do this,” Moran says.
"We were like: aha-ha-ha-ha? Because you forget – everything has changed so quickly – we’re in the world now of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and Lena Dunham and Melissa McCarthy and the Broad City girls and Kristen Wiig. All the money’s on funny women. We know now that women can be funny and there can be lots of them.
"But it was only recently that you were still getting Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens going women can’t be funny. So they were like: we’ve got our one female sitcom this year.
“I think it was only a pilot – it wasn’t even a series – because I remember angrily watching it on Boxing Day going ‘f*** you. So yeah, so then we just put it on hiatus. I went away and wrote How to Be a Woman, mainly fuelled with feminist fury that I’d been told that you can only have one set of funny women a year.”
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The flip-side for Moran is that How to be a Woman has sold more than half a million copies in 16 countries since it was published in 2011.
Raised by Wolves will air on Channel 4 later this month
