ES Lifestyle newsletter The latest lifestyle, fashion and travel trends Enter your email address Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in Register with your social account or click here to log in I would like to receive trends and interviews from fashion, lifestyle to travel every week, by email Update newsletter preferences

Hours before I meet the writer/performer Sharon Horgan, I watch her on all fours on a bed, howling as she kicks off the second series of Channel 4’s peerlessly savage comedy Catastrophe by giving birth. “Push it back in and cut it out!” she yells at her American co-star and co-creator on the show, Rob Delaney. “Oh no, am I s****ing myself now?”

“Barely!” squawks Delaney with trademark upbeat anguish, staring pop-eyed at her hindquarters.

Phew, thank goodness. The most brutally frank sitcom since — well, since Pulling, which Horgan co-created with Dennis Kelly back in 2006 — is just as good as it was the first time around.

As with Pulling, which painted a grim picture of low-income drinking and shagging in flatshare London, Horgan and her collaborator mined their own lives to create Catastrophe. She and Delaney play teacher “Sharon” and visiting advertising exec “Rob”, who conceive a child after a drunken shag and decide to have it. (Horgan fell pregnant six months into her relationship with ad exec Jeremy Rainbird, now her husband and a partner in her production company.) The first series dealt with such unlikely comic subjects as “geriatric” (ie, fortysomething) pregnancy, cervical dysplasia and foetal abnormalities. It had lots of sex and swearing, and ended with Sharon’s waters breaking as the two hurled abuse at each other on their wedding day.

It’s no spoiler to reveal that the couple start season two with a baby. And no great surprise that they can’t cope, an exhausted Sharon at one point dumping wetted bedding out of the window onto Rob’s head. “That comes directly from Rob’s mum when she was in the throes of having to cope with a kind of post-natal depression,” says Horgan, 45. There is a suggestion that Sharon’s father is suffering from dementia too. “It’s not something I have experienced in my life but people very close to us have had to deal with it,” says Horgan. “It’s that [sandwich generation] thing, when a new baby comes along and the older generation are going through their own troubles, too. We wanted the characters to have real problems, not sitcom problems, as people seemed to respond to the honesty of the first series.”

So Rob is still stuck in job hell, trying to get Radiohead to licence a track for an evil pharmaceutical commercial, and Carrie Fisher, as Rob’s mum, is still being a bitch. Rob and Sharon have a dog as well as a baby under their feet. “When I got pregnant unexpectedly I had just got a dog,” Horgan says. “It knocked me over when I was five months pregnant and I broke my knee.” Sharon-on-TV has called her daughter Muireann, the name Horgan planned for her firstborn but her husband, like Rob-on-TV, “found it very upsetting that I’d think of calling a child a name he couldn’t get his tongue around”. That daughter, now 12, ended up with the scarcely less easy Sadhbh (pronounced Sive); her sister Amer, seven, got off lightly.

"People like having their lives reflected back at them. If we weren’t taking stuff from our own lives, I don’t think it would be as satisfying." Sharon Horgan

One of the reasons Catastrophe works is that between the coruscating rows and buttock-clenchingly mortifying scenarios there’s a palpable attraction between the leads: they fancy each other and make each other laugh. Horgan and Delaney first found each other funny on Twitter and discussed working together before they met in real life. She says their respective spouses aren’t jealous and have given them “total creative licence to do what we want” in exploiting their marriages. “The thing people like is having their lives reflected back at them,” she says. “If we weren’t taking stuff from our own lives, I don’t think it would be as satisfying.

Thanks to Delaney, Catastrophe is different in tone to Horgan’s previous collaborations, not just Pulling but the sitcoms Angelo’s and Dead Boss, written with Chloe Thomas and Holly Walsh respectively, and both inexplicably cancelled after a single season. “I think it’s less harsh,” she says, hooking a thumb at the big, beaming Bostonian Delaney, who is talking at another table. “He has a sweetness that takes the edge off it. And I have changed a bit.”

Indeed. Horgan was born to an Irish mother and a New Zealander father in Hackney and brought up on a turkey farm in County Meath. Moving to London in her 20s, she subsidised her acting studies with menial jobs, including a two-year stint selling bongs in a head shop. All good grounding for a comedy writer, she concedes. “There’s a journey through the stuff I have done, aesthetically as well as content-wise,” she says. “I spent my first years in London squatting and not having a pot to p**s in, then went into s****y little rental accommodation in parts of London that people with money wouldn’t want to live in, then ended up in a nice bit of Hackney in a nice house. I suppose that is what the characters I have written about have done.”

She is “obsessed” with the capital, and says that “growing, changing” east London seemed the perfect fit for the slowly evolving characters of Catastrophe. She deliberately “painted the most beautiful picture” of the city that she could for the American market, and says the only problem with filming in east London is that you might clash with another camera crew: apparently, Dalston is rammed with them.

Of course, there is a point where Horgan and her characters diverge. She is seriously successful, and comedy feeds on failure. Today she’s jetlagged and wearing a big dollar-sign ring. After years of trying (and failing) to crack the American networks, HBO has commissioned her lacerating break-up sitcom Divorce, starring Sarah Jessica Parker — her first project for the company since Sex and the City. Horgan has said that when she met Carrie Fisher to talk about Catastrophe, she behaved like a star-struck child: “I was just trying to get into her room. I got into her bed. I was trying to make her laugh. I just immediately felt like ‘I want to be her friend’. With SJP she was more grown-up.

“We met in a restaurant,” Horgan says. “I spent a long time getting ready and turned up dressed to the nines but she was in sweatpants with no make-up. She had read some scripts I had written for HBO but hadn’t seen anything I had made. We just got on. She is an unassuming, unstarry, very sweet, considerate, nice person.” Is she going to be speaking the same vicious, scatological filth as the characters in Catastrophe? “Oh yeah. She’s fine with all that,” Horgan says, “although more comes from the mouth of Thomas Haden Church’s [husband] character — he is the mouthpiece for the more vile side of divorce. I’m trying to think of it as a small show with a big star in it, because that’s the only way I can process it.”

Once SJP said yes, HBO signed the deal. Horgan says the proliferation of new TV outlets and producers, from HBO to Netflix to Amazon, has counter-intuitively increased quality: they trust creatives more and are less worried about advertisers and hierarchy. It’s a great time in TV generally, she says —Catastrophe was speedily recommissioned, and she and Delaney have enough private embarrassment for at least one more series — though she would also like to break into film. Which brings us to the open letter recently penned by Jennifer Lawrence saying she was fed-up of being polite and un-pushy and accepting lower pay cheques than her male co-stars.

Best TV dramas 2015 - in pictures 9 show all Best TV dramas 2015 - in pictures 1/9 Empire, E4 Empire's Lyon family 2/9 Wayward Pines, Fox FOX 3/9 Game of Thrones, Sky Atlantic 4/9 The Affair, Sky Atlantic 5/9 Daredevil, Netflix 6/9 The Game, BBC Two 7/9 Poldark, BBC One BBC 8/9 Better Call Saul, Netflix Ben Leuner/AMC 9/9 Nashville, E4 E4 1/9 Empire, E4 Empire's Lyon family 2/9 Wayward Pines, Fox FOX 3/9 Game of Thrones, Sky Atlantic 4/9 The Affair, Sky Atlantic 5/9 Daredevil, Netflix 6/9 The Game, BBC Two 7/9 Poldark, BBC One BBC 8/9 Better Call Saul, Netflix Ben Leuner/AMC 9/9 Nashville, E4 E4

“I can’t really go into it but yeah, I have experienced a version of that,” says Horgan. “What I liked about her letter is that she is aware of being in a privileged position but it has to be spoken about. Although she is specifically talking about a Hollywood scenario and extremely large sums of money, it happens all the time in most working environments. It’s par for the course. It is ridiculous that you have to shout a lot louder [as a woman] to be heard. I am often too aware that I might be considered difficult just because I am ambitious, or I know what I want and know my mind. Maybe I wouldn’t be so aware of that if I was a man.” Although one result of achieving success relatively late (or “not getting my shit together sooner”, as she puts it) is that Horgan herself remains “grateful” whenever a limo picks her up from the airport: but for meetings she has grown “an incredibly thick skin”.

Right now she is more immediately exercised by the practical problems of a transatlantic career. “I’m killing myself, going back and forth. I’m in London now for six days, then I go back, then my kids come over three days later for a couple of weeks, then I’ll come back. My daughter’s just started secondary school so I couldn’t take them out. It’s incredibly hard. As I was leaving I was replaced by two hamsters. That was my way of dealing with it, giving them hamsters.” Does her husband or a nanny pick up the slack? “A bit of both.”

And here, weirdly, Horgan becomes a bit cagey. She’ll talk about s**t and shagging and vaginal tearing but her hubby’s off limits. “It’s not even to preserve privacy, it’s to preserve the show,” she says sheepishly. “If it’s on screen and if I am yapping about it, too — where does one start and the other end?” OK, she’s put relationships, marriage, childbirth and divorce under her forensic comic microscope. What’s next? “Death, I suppose,” she smiles.

Follow Nick on Twitter: @nickcurtis

Catastrophe returns to Channel 4 tomorrow at 10pm.