Hosting the new game show Flatmates brought back memories for Emma Kennedy of the four years she spent sharing a house with Late Lunch presenter Sue Perkins, Touching Evil's Nicola Walker and writer Sarah Phelps.
"Sue is very bad in the mornings and is the most untidy person I've ever shared with," says Emma. "She has blind spots to mess. We didn't have a washing machine, so we'd put our clothes in the bath and stir it about, in the hope that the hot water would encourage them to get clean. We used to call it pants soup.
"Sue had an obsession once with dental floss. We found it in her shoes. She also took to hanging it on the bathroom rail to dry it out."
Perhaps the strangest experience the girls had was with their eccentric 85-year-old landlady. "She used to send us parcels of cake and biscuits from Harvey Nichols.
"We'd go to her house for dinner now and again and she'd come down the stairs in a Stannah stairlift, blowing a hunting horn and wearing a big red top hat!
"I remember sitting next to a Polish war hero who I think was 87. During the main course, he started feeling me up under the table!"
Known for her work on The Real Holiday Show and Goodness Gracious Me, Emma will be presenting Flatmates for the next two months. Each week, a group of wannabe tenants are put through their paces by flatmates with room to spare. One lucky winner emerges victorious, with their first month's rent paid for.
Meanwhile, although it's two years since she shared with Sue, Emma admits: "It was the best time I've ever had. I remember laughing all the time. We didn't have a penny. We had a five-pound note glued to the wall which Nicola had received from Jilly Cooper after she'd written to her saying she wanted to go the drama school.
"We vowed that however desparate and hungry we were we'd never spend Jilly Cooper's five pounds."
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