Skins’ Megan Prescott debuts first theatre show ‘Really Good Exposure’ at EdFringe

Most people know Megan Prescott as red-haired twin Katie Fitch from Channel 4’s Skins. A lot has happened in the former child star’s life since the show ended, from work as a bartender, being a nanny, and even bodybuilding. Megan’s debut theatre show Really Good Exposure, however, focuses on the one job she’s done that isn’t as easy to talk about – sex work. In a show funded by sex work, Megan shares with us a personal and insightful take on the world of stripping, OnlyFans, and finding your place in the world.

Really Good Exposure tackles some tough subjects – body shaming, mental health stigma, and victim blaming to name a few. Why is it important to put this on stage for you? 

I have wanted to write something for years now that highlighted just how insidious some of the messaging millennials received as children was, and I felt it had to be in the form of a play because you get something so visceral from watching theatre in real life that you just don’t get from watching something on a screen. I think a lot of people will relate to the themes in Really Good Exposure; Even though I’m using a pretty niche microcosm of acting and sex work to tell the story, there are elements of the show that I’m pretty sure most women will have experienced at some point in their lives regardless of whether they have worked in performance or not. 

As a millennial, I was brought up on Disney films and diet culture. As a teenager, I watched the popstars I’d grown up idolising being harassed, insulted, and pitted against each other by the media on a daily basis. The early noughties was peak ‘child star to train wreck’ headline era and women in the public eye were treated pretty horrifically by the press if they deviated even slightly from whatever box they were expected to fit neatly into. It took me until my late twenties to truly understand just how bad some of the messaging we received as 90’s kids was, and how deeply ingrained some of those messages still are today. 

I really noticed this when I started to see Gen Z reaching their early 20s; they didn’t have as many of these harmful media narratives fed to them growing up and as a result are far more likely to notice, and call out problematic behaviour in adulthood. It made me really start to think about how much the media we consume as children dictates our world view (as well as how we view ourselves) as adults. 

I’ve spent the last decade unlearning a lot of the problematic messaging I was fed as a child and the more I educated myself about issues like body shaming, mental health stigma and the culture of victim blaming, the more I realised that of course millennials are predisposed to accept these things in society - we grew up consuming media which taught us that they were all perfectly normal! 

Seeing Gen Z’s reaction to some of the things millennials were taught were standard practice gives me hope for the future, but we’re still a long way off all of these problems and double standards being fixed. 

I’ve used my own life experience as inspiration for Really Good Exposure. I started stripping in my mid-twenties to support my acting career and was always terrified anyone would find out about it. Now, almost a decade later, I see the enormous hypocrisy in how we treat sex workers in society versus how we treat other performers. As women, we’ve been taught since birth that ‘sex sells’ and that our youth and sexiness are valuable commodities, but the moment we utilise those commodities for ourselves, rather than for other people’s profit, we’re demonised? 

I want people to watch Really Good Exposure and feel activated. Activated to learn more about sex workers rights, activated to refuse to accept patriarchal standards as the norm, and activated to take ownership of their bodies. 

Financial barriers within the arts are also a strong theme in your show. How do you think the industry can become more accessible to aspiring performers? 

Creative freelance industries, like acting, are incredibly hard to get into if you don’t come from privilege. So much of the work you need to do to even get your foot in the door of a lot of these industries is just expected to be done for free. The idea being that if you wanted it enough, you’d find the time/money to be able to work for free. Unfortunately, this equates to only those of us who are privileged enough to have financial support/a free place to live etc. being able to afford to get their foot in the door of those industries. 

I think the issue lies in the fact that a lot of people in more traditional work fields see artistic work as a ‘hobby’ and may not understand or respect the amount of work a freelance creative career takes. Freelance creative workers are expected to perform as if their ‘little hobby’ was a very well paid job but are still only paid as if it was a hobby (if they are paid at all!). It's either a hobby or a job; if it's a job, we need to be paid a living wage. If it’s a hobby, we cannot be expected to work the same hours as we would a ‘real job’ - it can't be both.

I think there’s a lot of ableism within how the creative freelance workforce is viewed. A lot of peoples’ minds are literally built for creative work and the conventional 9-5 workforce is not accessible to them for all manner of reasons; I am autistic and have ADHD and I can confidently say that I would never, ever be able to do a standard office job (and believe me, I’ve tried!). 

I would love to see a world where creative intelligence was valued just as much as what we have come to consider as the standard form. Then I think we would start to see creative freelance work becoming more accessible to more people. An attitude shift is really what is needed towards the creative freelance world. Things are starting to change, and I have a lot of hope for the future of the industry, but there are still a lot of shifts that need to occur for the financial, logistical and accessibility barriers to be removed so that everyone has access to work in whichever industry they are best suited for.

Your transition into sex work and specifically OnlyFans was a pivotal part of your journey. Do you think society’s attitudes to sex work (and sex workers) needs a dramatic upheaval? 

I do think society’s attitude towards sex work needs a huge upheaval. I think we are beginning to see this happen, but not quickly enough. People are starting to see the hypocrisies in what society considers ‘legitimate work’, and what it turns its nose up at. We’ve been taught that working 12-hour shifts doing physically and/or mentally draining labour at the cost of our mental and physical health is an acceptable way to make a living. The cost of living is creeping ever higher and even working six days a week is now barely covering a lot of people’s basic food and energy bills. We’re also being told that doing a job far better suited to us in terms of hours and accessibility, like sex work, is unacceptable. We have to question who benefits most from us being overworked and underpaid; its often those same people who tell us that sex work is the worst thing you could do with your life… 

I think it’s strange that we consider ourselves very advanced and forward thinking nowadays, but we’re still looking at sex work through this deeply heteronormative, patriarchal lens. Being paid to perform in a film involving nude sex scenes as an actor is widely acceptable in modern society, but if you were to shoot your own nude scene and sell it, lots of people would criticise you for that. It just doesn’t add up for me. It seems like it's not so much that we aren’t ok with people being paid for nude/sexual performances, and more like we just don’t like it when the actual performer is benefitting the most from their work. If we’re ok with big companies selling sex, then why can’t people do it individually? 

My show, Really Good Exposure, involves a scene where I will be entirely nude on stage, and people are paying to come and see the show. If we are ok with nudity onstage in the context of theatre, why aren’t we ok with people selling their own nude content online? If we’re ok with a teenager imitating sex on national tv but we’re not ok with a grown adult imitating sex on Only Fans then we have to admit that we don’t actually have a problem with transactional sexuality - we have a problem with the women in these transactions being the ones benefiting the most from them.

If you could go back in time and give Skins’ Katie Fitch one piece of advice, what would it be?

If I could give Katie Fitch one piece of advice it would be this: Violence is not the answer! Katie was smart; she could have done a lot better than to punch her bully in the face. I would love a world where instead of going straight to violence, Katie sat ‘Candy’ down and spoke to her about how they didn’t have to be enemies - women are always pitted against each other because we’re far more powerful when we all want each other to succeed! The footballer boyfriend Katie and Candy were salty over was also very much not worth giving the time of day, let alone giving Candy a bloody nose for! 

As a side note, I would also tell Katie to please stop bleaching her hair, for the love of god, be nicer to her sister and, as Coco Chanel famously said: Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one leopard print accessory off…’ 

Who is your show for? Who is the dream audience for Really Good Exposure? 

My show is for anyone who’s ever been made to feel shame around their body, their work or their sexuality. I would love for Millennials to see it and think ‘oh wow, it wasn’t just me, it was a generation of people who were taught these messed up ideals!’. I would love GenZ folks to see the show and think ‘wow, let’s make sure we never slip back into those old ways of treating people again’ and I would really love for older generations to see the show - GenX were taught even more harmful narratives than Millennials, but they didn’t have the accessibility of information that millennials/GenZ had and things like therapy were still heavily stigmatised. Many GenX-ers still carry the internalised stigma and shame that came from the harmful narratives they were taught as children and I would love for them to see the show and think ‘oh wow, maybe it’s not sex work that’s the problem, maybe it’s the patriarchy…’ 

Really Good Exposure will be performed at 5.20pm in Underbelly Cowgate (Belly Button) from 1st – 25th August (Not 7th, 13th or 20th) 

Booking link: https://underbellyedinburgh.co.uk/event/really-good-exposure