"Emma Thompson"

Emma Thompson joins from a sweltering North London office — 35 degrees, no air conditioning, her daughter and the daughter's boyfriend camped on the floor for the microphone cable — during a heat wave she pointedly notes 'obviously has nothing to do with climate change.' The hosts introduce her as the only artist with Academy Awards for both acting (Howards End) and screenwriting (Sense and Sensibility); she counters that the Oscars sit in the lavatory 'because that just keeps them in their place' and the BAFTAs live on a shelf too high to see. From there it's riffs on America's ice obsession, the death of Barneys, and fan encounters — she never refuses a child a selfie, and her favourite mistaken-identity story is a woman at Harry's Bar in Venice who was delighted to see her doing so well ... because she believed Thompson had once sold her shoes on the fifth floor at Barneys.

The career material is unusually specific. She came up through Cambridge Footlights with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry intending to be a comedian in the Lily Tomlin mould, not an actor. She has spent, by her own count, about 30 days of her entire career on Harry Potter, which she finds strange to discuss given how much of the fan attention it draws; Professor Trelawney's Coke-bottle myopia came straight from the books. Sense and Sensibility happened because producer Lindsay Doran saw her sketch about a Victorian bride baffled by her husband's anatomy — a feminist bit about enforced sexual ignorance — and wrote asking if she'd fancy adapting Jane Austen. The thing that used 'every single cell' of her was Sweeney Todd with Bryn Terfel and the New York Philharmonic: nine months to learn, about 30 performances, and her verdict that Sondheim is harder than Shakespeare, who is 'a wonderful old sailing boat.'

There's also a run of what's-next: Down Cemetery Road, the Mick Herron adaptation in which she relishes playing Zoe, a woman raised nothing like the 'lovely and kind and emollient' good girl Thompson was brought up to be; a Nanny McPhee stage musical, ten years in the writing with Sing Street's Gary Clark (touchstones: Tom Waits and the Tiger Lillies), reaching the West End next year; and The Sheep Detective, Craig Mazin's film with Hugh Jackman whose logline — a shepherd is murdered and his sheep solve the crime — she says was reason enough to sign. Along the way: her parents' theatre upbringing, a grandmother who went into service at 16, telling her daughter the television was broken for eight years, and the hosts pitching her a Stanley Tucci-style series where she rediscovers England.