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What could be more fun, festive and fascinating that a frank chat with an undisputed ‘National Treasure’; the comedian and author Dawn French! Fi and Jane from the podcast Fortunately took the opportunity to quiz Dawn on her suitability for bishoping, her parenting style, tips on love and flirting plus they unearth the fact that Dawn has met the Big Man himself.

Ok, perhaps you might have worked this one out already. Though it didn’t stop Fi and Jane insisting that Dawn is the ‘nation’s vicar’ and even encouraged her to run for Archbishop of Canterbury. She was at pains to point out that she isn’t actually ordained, though this has been quite hard to grasp for some people. “I’ve been asked to exorcise people’s homes,” Dawn told them. “I’ve been asked to baptise their children, I’ve been asked to marry people. I haven’t said yes because it’s illegal.” She even managed to blag tickets for Concorde by donning the dog collar at just the right moment.

She hates flying

The current ongoing quarantine situation has had one added bonus for Dawn. She’s avoided the flying that she usually has to do as part of her job, but really dislikes. Despite coming from a RAF family (and happily taking trips on Concorde, as we have heard), she has no affinity with being airborne. “I've got a ridiculous fear of flying. I start to worry about it a few days before and I don’t really get over it until a couple of days after it. I just don’t like it. It feels completely unnatural for me.”

Her childhood helped to develop her comedy

One side-effect of growing up in a RAF family was constantly moving. Dawn thinks she moved 11 or 12 times during her early childhood, which led to her developing a ‘fake gregarious’ side, as she calls it. “You move to a new school and no one really wants to be your friend. I was forever putting on the personality fireworks display to make sure that everyone loves me. ‘I’ll make you laugh’.” This persona has followed her into her showbiz career. “Every job you do on telly is like a new little family you have to make.”

She's seen the real Santa!

During one extended stay at a RAF base in Cyprus, Dawn can remember a very unusual yuletide occurrence. She actually spotted Santa Claus flying overhead. “ I did have a very odd experience. I was eight years old, I opened the shutters, I looked up. There he is! In the sky! I don’t think I was dreaming.” Sadly Santa has not been spotted by her since.

She had no intention of becoming a writer

Despite writing comedy sketches with Jennifer Saunders during her prestigious comedy career, Dawn didn’t necessarily want to be an author. It was only when an unauthorised biography of her life was released, that she changed her mind. “That book came out and it was full of so many inaccuracies. About my family and my parents’ marriage. I thought my only answer to this is to write my own book. It was when I sat down to do that I thought, ‘oh I like this’”. She has gone on to write a dozen books of fiction, memoir and crafting.

Dawn has a large extended family and she often hosts all of them at Christmastime as she has ‘the biggest table’. The number of people can be in the low 20s, making the clean-up operation quite a major task. But she has an ingenious way to get the kids to take care of it. Bribery. “When they were younger I’d bribe them to wash up. I’d give them a fiver. We’d just leave the kitchen and the kids would get a bribe to clean it all up.”

She's not good at flirting

Dawn admitted that she struggled with romance later in life and found the notion of trying to meet someone, romantically, quite hard to get to grips with. “I don't think I've ever been able to flirt. What is flirting anyway? Batting your eyelids at people? Who wants to do that? You look like you’ve got conjunctivitis.”

The man of her dreams was right under her nose

But she eventually found love in an unlikely spot. Her husband, “was right under my nose.” While researching a book, she visited an old friend of her mum’s who ran a charity to help people with addictions. She had met him many times previously and had never thought of him as a romantic prospect. But as she sat with him, something happened. “The sun comes out from behind a cloud. It was like Fellini had lit him. I was instantly in love. Everything changed, from just sitting with a man filling time, to going, ‘Oh, look at that man’. I had no interest in him and then suddenly I did.”