Charlotte Church recalls Chris Moyles offering on air to take her virginity when she turned 16

Singer said there was a countdown to her turning 16 in the press

Charlotte Church has recalled a “gross” countdown to her losing her virginity that was run in the press when she was a teenager.

Rising to fame as a classical singer as a child, Church would go on to pursue a career in pop music in the mid Noughties.

Appearing on Sink The Pink’s Pop Tarts podcast, the musician described how the press constructed a “narrative” around her when she was a teenager due to a “particular venom” for working class women.

Presenter Tete Bang then asked Church about being publicly sexualised at a young age, with the singer winning the Rear of the Year award at the age of 16.

At the time, Wales’s first minister Rhodri Morgan called her winning the prize “somewhat unsavoury”, but Church admitted in the interview that she had accepted the award because she “wasn’t seeing myself as a youth”.

Church in 2002 (Gareth Everett/Shutterstock)

“There was something worse, there was a countdown to me losing my virginity, The Sun had done a countdown,” she said.

Read more: Why we’re all suddenly talking about the Noughties

“And then Chris Moyles talked about it on Radio 1. It was all a bit gross, really.”

In 2002, Moyles, who was then presenting BBC Radio 1’s drive-time show, offered to take the singer’s virginity, saying that he wanted to “lead her through the forest of sexuality now she had reached 16”.

The Broadcasting Standards Commission said that the “explicit sexual content and humour had exceeded acceptable boundaries for the time of transmission”.

Discussing similar comments that were made towards Billie Eilish when she turned 18 in 2019, Church said: “Don’t get me wrong, we’ve come a certain way, but there’s a long way to go in terms of feminism and equality.”

The Independent has contacted Moyles’s representatives for comment.