Which moment embarrassed you most?

Sending a text meant for my wife to Dara O'Briain by mistake, revealing myself to be a control freak.

I don’t embarrass easily: I’m kinda shameless.

Farting in front of Colin Firth.

I remember being a teenager and writing this romantic short story in the style of the Brontës on a computer and I didn’t realise that the person whose computer it was could just print it out. A group of boys had a couple of pages and they were all reading it.

I did a corporate gig early in my career, and they opened the buffet in the middle of my set and everybody left.

A gazillion years ago I was in Gucci with Melanie Blatt, and I attempted to sit down on a chair that wasn’t there. I did a full-on stuntwoman backward roll, landed in a ball of the floor and laughed so hard I wet myself. Everybody in the shop moved to a different section.

I was once walking through Edinburgh with someone in the industry. I was quite drunk and I slowly wet myself.

I have a deep-rooted fear of being in trouble. I once tried to sneak into the back of a photography exhibition with my husband when one of our kids was in a pushchair. We’d arrived late and he suggested we go in through the gift shop and see the last room. As we poked our heads round the door, the security guard noticed us. I shouted, “That man’s trying to get in!”, then ran away.

Being torn to shreds by a very elderly woman for driving badly on the Isle of Man, maybe 15 years ago. She stopped in the middle of the road and really let me have it.

I worked with Stephen Fry recently and we had a real heart-to-heart. I asked: “What was it like being in prison for being gay?” And thank God someone came in and he didn’t hear me say it. I was mixing him up with when he played Oscar Wilde. I could picture him in his cell.

Being an actor is inherently embarrassing. You have to embrace it.

I was in Oliver! when I was 10 and I peed myself on stage in front of however many people the Palladium holds. It was the stuff of nightmares.

When I was losing my sight, I couldn’t see where I was going, and I went into an undertaker’s thinking it was a barber’s. I asked the undertaker whether he had many waiting.

Leaving the stage from a panic attack in my 20s. Hearing the audience angry.

After the 2012 Olympics I hosted the parade. I had on a little skirt and when the prime minister came on everyone cheered. I thought: “Oh my God, they love David Cameron,” but they were cheering because my skirt had blown up, and I’d flashed my knickers at him.

At school, I got my head stuck in a balustrade on the stairs at lunchtime. I had pupils laughing at me, parents laughing at me, teachers laughing at me and eventually, at the end of the day, the fire brigade laughing at me.

On radio, I once said “anal” instead of “angel”.

On one of my first jobs, Cold Mountain, I got a wasp in my ear in front of Jude Law. He couldn’t see the wasp so just saw me freak out.

Putting chocolate mousse in my agent’s face. Somebody had done it to me – that thing where they go, “Smell this, it smells funny”, and then they put it in your nose. A year later I was in this French restaurant with a very 1980s-style dessert trolley and, before I knew it, I had a bowl of chocolate mousse in front of me. And my agent went, “What’s that smell?”, and it felt impossible not to … I immediately felt awful and tried to apologise. He, of course, said that he found it funny. But I knew he didn’t.

Accidentally walking on to set naked for a scene where I wasn’t actually supposed to be naked.