Hugh Laurie as Sam and Joely Richardson as Lucy: upwardly mpbile but infertile.

If talking kept you warm, Ben Elton’s central heating bills would be the lowest in Britain. “I like films with words in them as well as pictures,” he says, the former spilling out of him every bit as fast as they did in his stand-up comedy routines, whose machine-gun delivery made him a household name in Britain.

“I don’t think that something should be a film just because it’s got an exploding building in it or an invasion from Mars, and that otherwise it should be on a stage or on telly. This script, I think, is one that deserved to be made.”

It’s an unseasonably cold day in mid-September, and Elton is standing outside a soundstage at Shepperton Studios, west of London. He’s outside and cold because inside it may be warm, but conversation is impossible: production on Maybe Baby, the romantic comedy which marks Elton’s feature debut, both as a director and as a screenwriter, is just nine days short of wrapping.

“They’re banging and crashing and getting my next bit of lighting together,” he says. “That’s the worst thing about making films: waiting for the lights.” The film - produced by Phil McIntyre who, like Elton, cut his teeth on television comedy, for Paris-based Pandora who financed the movie, and BBC Films - stars Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson as a young married couple, with several of Elton’s pals, including Rowan Atkinson and Emma Thompson, doing brief cameos. Atkinson has a couple of scenes as the kind of obstetrician you wouldn’t want near your obstetrics, while Thompson flits in and out as a barmy New Age birthing specialist.