REAL LIFE
SWINGING sixties
After her husband passed away, Helen Coneyworth turned to chatlines to make ends meet, but never realised how much her life would change...
When Helen’s beloved husband passed away, she was heartbroken and faced with debts and funeral costs. In desperate need of cash, she started working on a sex chatline, where the money rolled in.
In her late 50s, Helen enjoyed casual sex with strangers and started attending swingers clubs. But when her new lease of life started to take its toll, Helen traded it in for a career in stand-up comedy, which she loves.
She says, “I certainly went off the rails, but it led me to where I am now and I’m in a fantastic place!”
HEARTBROKEN
In 2009, Helen married Andrew, who was a sales and marketing manager, in a stunning, intimate ceremony on a desert island in New Zealand. She says, “We’d only been together for 18 months, but we knew it was right. Andrew was so kind and calm.”
They bought a house to renovate, but the work took longer than expected. Helen, 60, explains, “It was a building site and a money pit. Andrew had Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, and as the renovation dragged on, his health grew worse and I became his full-time carer on top of working on the house and going to my IT job.”
In May 2021, Andrew suffered a heart attack in his wheelchair. Helen desperately tried to resuscitate him, but when medics arrived, he had passed away, just weeks from turning 60. Helen says. “I was heartbroken. I didn’t know how to cope without him. I was also left with debts and funeral costs to pay for. We’d put so much money into our house, too.”
Looking for an extra way to make money that she could fit around the house and her day job, Helen remembers she and Andrew laughing at a chatline worker on TV who was on the phone with a client while painting her kitchen wall. Helen thought it was an easy way to make extra money so, aged 57, signed herself up to a sex chatline and took some saucy photos and recorded voice messages for her profile.
She explains, “With Andrew’s health and the renovation, we’d become too tired and stressed for sex. I was very vanilla so I had to research everything. It was like learning anew language!”
But Helen was a hit with her male clients, charging up to £1 a minute. She laughs, “That’s £60 per hour. I knew I’d make more if I spoke in a slow, sultry voice to draw the call out for longer, plus it was good for describing the lacy lingerie my callers thought I was wearing, when I was actually sitting on my bed in my PJs with Corrie on mute!
DOMINATION
“Once, a client asked to hear me orgasm – I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had one! But I channelled that famous
