INTERVIEW:Dawn French is in sparkling form, with a first novel just out and a romantic interest bringing a twinkle to her eye, she tells Róisín Ingle

THE BAR OF the Dublin hotel where Dawn French is staying is full of glamourous women in celebratory mode. “Is there a do going on?” asks French. I had wondered the same thing earlier and made inquiries with a couple of the excited women who were being photographed. It turned out they were ambassadors for a chain of gyms being honoured for their weight-loss achievements. I pass this on to the short woman with glossy dark hair walking beside me, who does a classic Dawn French comedy eye roll. “I’m not a regular frequenter of gyms,” she dead-pans.

Later, when she has decided not to order a gin and tonic and has settled down on a sofa, she mentions the fact that you’d be hard pressed to read an article about her where the issue of weight isn’t mentioned. “Sometimes it’s done in a mean way, but I do find it strange because it’s not as though it’s a new thing, I’ve been this size for a long time, you would think people might not feel the need to talk about it, that it would be old news by now,” she says.

Her tone is more incredulous than irritated. This is, after all, the woman who provided a classic Irish comedy TV moment when she made Pat Kenny prostrate himself on the floor of the Late Late Showstudio and apologise for an ill-judged comment he made about her attractiveness. "Oh, that's ancient history, I've long forgiven Pat for that, although I'll never forgive the cream safari suit he wore," she smiles.

Her weight is a source of fascination, she believes, because some people find it impossible to believe that as a larger woman she can be confident and comfortable in her skin. “There are people who think I must be in some really, really deep denial . . . so much so that I’ve sometimes had to stop and ask myself whether they are right and is it really a front, and then I realise that no, actually I really am happy and it’s their problem, not mine.”

The truth is that confidence has never been a problem for French. It was only a few years ago while writing her memoir Dear Fatty– Fatty is the nickname she has for her best friend and comedy partner Jennifer Saunders – that she realised it was probably her father, an RAF pilot who suffered from crippling depression and killed himself when she was 19, who gave her that gift. French is in town to do publicity for her first novel, A Tiny Bit Marvellous. The father in this book is a quiet kind of hero; we only learn at the end that his name is Den. French's father was called Denys.

“It just was never an issue at home, I was never teased about it, I was never told I should do something about it, my father made me feel beautiful and important and worthwhile,” she says. It was only when she got older that she realised other bigger women were made to feel ashamed because of their weight. When she started her clothing business for larger women, she remembers, “women would come in and burst into tears because they had found a pair of trousers that fit them and looked nice. All their lives they had been made to feel that they didn’t deserve decent clothes because of their size and I just think that kind of fascism is terrible.”

She does seem very happy, if slightly tired, grinning the famous grin she has employed through a fantastically successful career from The Comic Strip Presents. . . to French and Saunders through to The Vicar of Dibleyand Lark Rise to Candlefordand latterly in the understated and masterful BBC2 series Roger and Val Have Just Got In.

The original idea for the drama about a happily married couple and how they spend the half hour after they come home from work was hers, but she is at pains to praise the series writers, twin sisters Beth and Emma Kilcoyne. “Brilliant writers, both of them,” she says.

She is glad the series is to continue and says it’s “rather excellent” being a first-time novelist, although the word novelist sounds, she says, slightly “Edwardian”. She is also experiencing, but declines to give details of, a romantic revival, since her marriage to comedian Lenny Henry came to an end after 25 years in what appear to be exceedingly civilised circumstances.

The couple announced their marriage was over last April but long before that they had reached a stage when they decided they were “just friends . . . there wasn’t anything else left”.

“We talked about it for a long time, we stayed up late, we drank, we really spent a lot of time trying to figure it all out,” she says. “We asked each other what we would do about it . . . it was a long process of communicating but the most important thing was that we were always going to be friends. I said, I don’t not want you in my life, and he said, I don’t want to be without you, so we found a way to make that work.”

They have managed the break up so successfully that their daughter, a horse-mad 19-year-old called Billie, has said she barely notices the difference. By the time the news broke, the couple had been talking it through for six months and were on a family holiday together. Obviously what she chooses to tell journalists about this seismic shift in her life isn’t the complete story but she does seem pleased with how they negotiated what for most couples is a period of massive personal and practical upheaval.

“I am seeing Len on Sunday; we speak on the phone all the time,” she says of the man who remains one of her best friends. “Obviously it would be odd if either of us found anyone permanent but we just talk through all the oddness, that’s just the way we are. The way I describe it is that we were floating along the river together for years and then we got stuck in some reeds and now we are back on the river again, just floating separately now.”

While all the break-up talk was going on, French was also writing her novel in their home on the cliffs of Cornwall, where she lives full time now, having made the move she always said she would make from London to be near her mother and her Devon roots. “I loved writing it,” she says. “It was wonderful sitting at my desk looking out at the sea and thinking about what was going on with these characters.”

The book follows three members of the Battle family. Child psychologist Mo, who is almost 50 and feeling grey inside and out, her comically self-loathing daughter Dora, who is about to turn 18, and her gay son Peter, who is in the throes of an Oscar Wilde fixation. It’s typical French, laugh-out-loud funny in places, achingly poignant in others. She is particularly good on the disintegration, both emotional and physical, experienced by some women as they go into their 50s.

“It’s a big one, turning 50, for a lot of people,” says French, who has just turned 53. The transition, the physical one anyway, has been less traumatic for her because she says that physically she gave up on herself at around the age of 20. As a result, she wasn’t horrified by any formerly pert parts of her body dropping or drooping, but she has witnessed that horror in female friends.

Thanks to her daughter, who hasn’t read the book – “she couldn’t be less interested in what I do” – she is also around enough teenage women to perfectly capture the voice of “oh my complete and utter god, I hate myself, I am so fugly” Dora. The character spews an often hilarious avalanche of mother-hating vitriol. “I think mothers and daughters need to have this separation at some point and I think it happens because it prepares the mother for the day that the daughter leaves the home. If this separation didn’t happen the mother might just die of grief,” she says.

In the novel, which French wrote longhand and in pencil, as she does everything, Mo is going through the "pink fog" of menopause, something French has been experiencing herself. "It's still happening, I mean when does it end, nobody tells you when it ends, that's the funny thing." She wasn't expecting the forgetfulness that can accompany the process. "Things are supposed to end but actually things begin, like not remembering people's names." She is tickled when she hears about Menopause the Musical, starring Twink. "What is Twink?" she asks but there isn't enough time to explain.

She talks a lot about women, about her mother and the value of her female friendships, including Jennifer Saunders. Even when asked about which contemporary comedians she enjoys – Catherine Tate, Josie Long, Jo Brand among others – the list doesn’t include any men. “Hmmmmm,” she says, with a dramatic head scratch when I ask for some blokes.

What about Ricky Gervais? "I think The Officewas funny but for some reason he's been quite unkind to me and Len over the years – you'd have to ask him why – so I have to put the drawbridge up when it comes to him."

The next novel is "percolating" in her mind. The idea came to her when she was in "receiving mode" at a concert by Streets of Londonsinger Ralph McTell. "I am in receiving mode, passive mode, a bit more these days, I am enjoying the simpler things, I am not rushing about so much," she says.

French doesn’t make notes about her ideas, she just thinks things through on the long drives from work meetings in London back home to Cornwall. She drives because too many people approach her on the train and she’d never get anything done. “They think I’m a vicar,” she explains, but really you suspect it’s because she’s one of those celebrities that many people hold in great affection, someone with whom they’d quite like to go for a pint of cider or share a Terry’s chocolate orange with. Does she understand that affection?

“Well I think it can happen when you make people laugh, they have a certain fondness for you, I mean I have that for Eric Morecambe, I always will, so I do know what that feels like.”

She has talked about feeling, in her 50s and newly single, a little bit “bring it on”. What does she mean? “Well, I won’t be going bungee jumping but I might be doing some emotional bungee jumping.” Does that mean she has a new gentleman caller? “Oh, I really can’t say. It wouldn’t be fair on other people,” she says grinning that stupendous grin, a woman with a mischievous soul who is more than just a tiny bit marvellous.

“You can say she said that with a twinkle in her eye.”