When you're 16 you don't know what's going on... I was just happy to get big storylines

FORMER CORONATION STREET STAR HELEN FLANAGAN TALKS TO HANNAH BRITT ABOUT HOW SHE FELT SEXUALISED BY SCENES IN THE SOAP WHEN SHE WAS JUST A TEENAGER

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FINDING HER VOICE: Helen Flanagan, who says she's upset the apple cart with her debut book

HELEN FLANAGAN has revealed sexualised storylines she was given in Corrie as a teenager before the Me Too movement made her feel uncomfortable.

The actress was just 16 when her character, Rosie Webster, had an underage affair with her teacher.

At 15, even younger than Helen was at the time, Rosie was shown “seducing” John Stape, played by Graeme Hawley, who later kidnapped her and held her hostage after the affair was exposed.

Now 35, Helen is raising questions around the scenes she got and the way she was portrayed in the soap, which she joined aged nine.

The actress says: “Was it morally right that I was expected to parade about in my knickers like some mad nymphomaniac when I was still just a teenager?

"Alison King, who plays Carla Connor, once kicked off in the green room, saying how disgusting it was that they were sexualising me when I was a young girl. I didn't fully comprehend what she was talking about at the time. I do now. I get it.

"I had to do kissing and bedroom scenes with a man a lot older than me. Obviously the actor [Graeme Hawley] was lovely, but I don’t think it would happen now.

"When you're 16 you don’t know what's going on and I was just happy to get the big storylines.

"But I had scenes as Rosie which didn’t always sit comfortably with me.

"Everything has changed now, which I'm glad about. They wouldn't write it in quite the same way all these years later and since the Me Too movement.”

Mum-of-three Helen finds her current role quite different. She is playing Catherine in the Shelagh Stephenson play The Memory of Water, at Bolton's Octagon Theatre.

Now she has an intimacy coordinator, to make sure she is comfortable with everything.

“Back then you just got on with it,” she says of her Corrie days.