'It was a boys' club...I wish I'd had more confidence'

HELEN Lederer parked her Renault 4 on a hill when she dropped fellow comedian Ben Elton off at his London flat after a gig. “We were canoodling and suddenly I realised the car was moving,” she tells me.

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“One of our legs or elbows must have dislodged the handbrake.

“I’m not sure Ben knew we were on the move and I was too embarrassed to say anything.”

So the pals, who had first hit it off in the back of a van on the way to that early 80s Brighton show, carried on “saying goodbye” as the car rolled quietly backwards before colliding with a parked vehicle at the bottom of the hill, giving new meaning to going out with a bang.

Helen’s life has been a bit of a car crash too. But the sitcom actress — best known for playing dippy journalist Catriona in Absolutely Fabulous for 15 years and the voluptuous Viscountess of Moldova in Bottom — makes fun of “the bad stuff” in her autobiography, Not That I’m Bitter, out now in paperback.

“It’s not a kiss and tell,” Helen, 70, assures me, her striking pale blue eyes blazing over the Zoom link. Although she does discreetly let slip about passionate flings with comedians Rik Mayall and Harry Enfield.

“It was a busy time, you were working late at night, people weren’t married,” she says. “We were young and we were part of something...

“My mother would have grimaced if she’d read it. My older sister Janet said, ‘There’s so much about you I didn’t know!’” She doesn’t spare her own blushes either.

Multiple embarrassments include comedically dying at a charity lunch hosted by the Princess Royal, a gig she’d “inherited” from Sandi Toksvig.

“It was daytime, people weren’t drinking, I misread the room, I hadn’t prepped my pronunciation, so I didn’t pronounce the name of a fashion expert correctly...,” she recalls with a shudder. “Anyone else would have quietly left, but I went back to Princess Anne’s table. The lady-in-waiting wouldn’t speak me.”

Some of Helen’s stories involve shocking abuse, like the drama teacher who molested her with the handle of a Le Creuset saucepan.