Sharon Horgan has revealed a huge on-camera mistake that almost made it into the final edit of her Bafta-winning Channel 4 comedy Catastrophe.
The show, which ran for four seasons from 2015 to 2019, starred Horgan and Rob Delaney as two people who end up accidentally having a baby together after a fling in London. Horgan and Delaney also co-wrote the series.
Speaking at the 2025 Hay Festival, which has partnered with The Independent for a second year, Horgan discussed what it is like to juggle being both the writer and star of a show – and admitted it once almost led to a big mistake.
“It’s sort of something you learn with time, that also you never learn,” she said. “I remember when we were making Catastrophe, I think it was season two, and we had a great American actress, Michaela Watkins, who was playing Rob’s sister.
“And we were in the edit, I mean, we were in the sort of fine-cut stage, and we were watching a scene with the sister flipping out, I can’t remember what about, and then we noticed that I was in the background mouthing along with her words.”
She added: “Obviously in my head I was thinking, like, this is how it should be done, or, this is how we heard it. But we saw that just before we locked it.”
Of their working relationship, Horgan said that sometimes she and Delaney would arrive on set so soon after finishing a script that they were practically “still washing the ink off our hands”.
“We’d be on set, standing opposite each other, going, why the f*** did we write another sex scene? This is terrible,” she said.
Irish star Horgan, 54, has been behind some of the most popular and successful television in recent years, from Catastrophe to BBC One’s Motherland and Apple TV’s Bad Sisters.
She is currently developing two book adaptations at her production company Merman: Julia May Jonas’s provocative sexual politics novel Vladimir, and Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died – a non-fiction book about the author’s relationship with her abusive mother.
