Rowan Coleman - Ruby Parker - Soap Star

I like watching you on TV because you are so like me and when sometimes you get fed up because Caspian Nightingale doesn’t know you love him, you always seem to come through OK. I like you much better than any of the other teenagers on Kensington Heights. You are the only one who looks real.

Thank you.

Love Amy Bertram

PS Don’t worry about writing back I bet you are busy. Unless you want to that is.

Ruby Parker

Dear Amy,

Thank you for your letter. I am glad that you enjoy the show so much and that you identify with Angel’s character – she is lots of fun to play. I do get a lot of letters usually, but I haven’t had so many recently as we have been off-air for a while. I started shooting the new series as soon as school broke up for summer a couple of weeks ago, so no holiday for me! It starts again next week. I think you’ve been watching it on UK Gold as the story line you describe was two series ago. Angel has got a different duvet cover now.

You asked me if I have a helper to answer all my letters and I do, it’s my mum – and sometimes my cat Everest. (Although he’s not really much help as he sits on the papers.)

I don’t know if you saw the helplines advertised at the ends of those episodes about Angel’s mum drinking a lot, but just in case you didn’t I have enclosed some leaflets with them on, in case you wanted to talk to someone about it. Otherwise you could speak to a teacher if you are worried. As you know, Angel didn’t tell her dad about her mum’s secret drinking for ages and it really got on top of her. After she talked to an adult she felt much better about it.

Keep watching the show!

Best wishes

Ruby x

Like I said, it was an accident in the first place that I got famous. I wasn’t even trying. I didn’t even have to queue up for six hours with thousands of other girls and then go through six weeks of elimination rounds. I didn’t even know I was auditioning, but then I was only six so it’s not that surprising, because when you’re six you don’t really think ahead all that much, do you? When I was six everyone said I was beautiful with my blonde curly hair and dimpled smile. I even played Goldilocks in the school play and the Virgin Mary in the Nativity. It’s a bit of a shock to wake up one day and discover that if I auditioned for the same plays today I’d probably get the part of the fat grizzly bear, or maybe a goat.

Anyway, I didn’t go to a stage school back then. I just went to an ordinary school and then on weekends I went to a drama club, which Mum said I should go to because I was always putting on shows in the living room and doing ballet and singing. Dad agreed I should go if it would shut me up for five minutes. And they laughed about it for ages because they knew he didn’t really mean it – he used to love me to sing to him, even though back then I went out of tune a lot and mostly forgot the right words. They still have all my shows on video, even the really bad ones. Actually, one of them appeared on last Christmas’s edition of Before They Were Famous. It was the one when I was doing a sailor dance all on my own at Mrs Buttle’s drama club’s annual show and I sneezed and all this snot shot out and ran down my chin. Dad thought it was hilarious, but Mum and I didn’t speak to him for the rest of Christmas: I was mortified. I knew then I’d never get a boyfriend – especially not Justin de Souza, who is so handsome it hurts to look at him. But it was pointless staying angry at Dad. If I had no one would have been talking to anyone and what kind of Christmas is that?

So, I’d been going for a while, and then one day Mum made a big fuss about what I wore to the club and spent ages doing my hair. And these two men showed up to class and they didn’t look anything special to me, except that one of them made Mrs Buttle, our teacher, go all high-pitched and red. (I didn’t know then that he was the famous actor Martin Henshaw, who used to be on a cop show before I was even born and who’s now Angel MacFarley’s dad, Graham MacFarley.)

Mrs Buttle told us we were playing a game and we all had to take it in turns to come and talk about our mums and dads. Well, I stood in the middle when it was my turn and I told them about how my mum likes to dance to eighties music when she’s hoovering, that sometimes we do the conga around the house for no special reason, and that my dad snores so loudly he makes the alarm clock on the bedroom shelf vibrate. That’s all I said. Next thing I knew I’d got the part as Angel MacFarley in Kensington Heights. But I was only six, and to be honest I didn’t really have a clue what it meant except that I’d go and play “pretend” somewhere else apart from Mrs Buttle’s drama club and under the dining room table.

I do remember that my mum and dad argued about it for ages, though. I remember that because it was the first really loud argument I’d ever heard them have, even if it was a laughing argument. I remember they went into the kitchen and shut the door as if it would keep me from hearing them. It didn’t then and it never has done since, not even with the volume of the TV turned up and my bedroom door shut too.

My mum said what an amazing opportunity it was for me and my dad said there’d be plenty of time for opportunities when I was older. My mum said that there might not be and that sometimes opportunities don’t come twice and she never got any chances when she was my age and she wasn’t having me deprived of them like she was. Then my dad asked, wasn’t she happy? She said of course she was, she just wanted me to be happy, and he said that if I had a Barbie and a king-size bar of Dairy Milk I’d be over the moon, and she said, “You know what I mean, Frank!” And in the end he gave in, because he always did back then.

He doesn’t even really have to give in any more. Mum sort of stopped asking him his opinion recently, which I suppose means that at least they argue less. It used to be when they argued that they’d sort of laugh at the same time, (like the day I got the part in Kensington Heights ) and that later on they’d be all cuddly and soppy. But then – I don’t really remember when I first noticed – the arguments got louder and there wasn’t any laughing. Or any cuddling. And when they’d finished, after everything had gone quiet, and maybe one of them had gone out and slammed the front door, either Mum or Dad would find me and ruffle my hair and ask me if I was OK. And I always said yes, as if I’d never heard them.

Nydia thinks that Mum and Dad are having a “difficult patch”, like a couple we saw on Trisha during half term. I hope so, and think as long as I stay out of the way, turn up the TV and keeping saying I’m OK, everything will stay the same and we’ll be OK. Except everything is changing and it feels like there’s nothing I can do. I can see what’s happening to Mum and Dad, I can feel it, but I can’t seem to stop it. I keep running up those escalators but I’m still not getting anywhere.

Anyway, as I said, I was blonde when I six and sort of cute and chubby with dimples. Now, according to Amy from Birmingham, I’m the most real-looking teenager in the show, and according to Liz Hornby, who I accidentally overheard talking about me during a script meeting on the set this morning, I’m going through a “difficult lumpy stage”. I suppose what she meant is that since we finished series seven I’ve got these two extra bits. The Breasts.

You’d think there’d be a sort of adjustment period, wouldn’t you? There should be a sort of a warning for when they were coming up. I thought that I was bound to be one of those girls who had to wait for years to get any at all and then they’d be tiny small ones like Mum’s. I didn’t think I’d be the first girl in my year to get them. I didn’t think they’d start out being a C cup! Everyone says that I’m a freak and, by the sound of what Liz Hornby was saying earlier today, they’re right. I am a freak. A big, lumpy, difficult-stage freak. Anne-Marie is so going to love this when it gets out.