After that, she reminds those present at the lunch, there were “nail-bitingly, life-threateningly scary forays into comedy” on the London stand-up circuit before she reteamed with Fry and Laurie in 1983 for a pilot for a mockumentary called The Crystal Club that the BBC opted not to pick up for a full series.
A stint in the West End revival of the musical Me and My Girl put her on the map. “I was very much encouraged by the reviews I got in those days,” she recalls as she pivots back to the subject of criticism, “and when I went back into comedy, I thought that maybe that encouragement might continue.”
She was, Emma adds with a grimace, wrong. In 1985 she wrote and appeared in a one-off comedy special called Emma Thompson: Up For Grabs — the critical reaction to which she likens to being “set upon by hellhounds intent on pulling my most essential organs, like the pancreas, out of my mouth.”
She got into serious screen acting “by mistake” when Robbie Coltrane, with whom she’d done a couple of sketch shows on TV, suggested her for the role of guitar-playing band member Suzi Kettles in the drama series Tutti Frutti. The show triumphed at the 1988 BAFTA awards, with Thompson herself receiving the Best Actress trophy.