Yes, I knew Carrie Fisher. She played my mom on Catastrophe, the sitcom I write and star in with Sharon Horgan. Or should I say, “plays my mom”, since we just finished shooting last week and Carrie’s scenes haven’t been seen by anyone yet. Except for me and Sharon that is, and our director, producer and editor. We’ve seen them and they’re amazing. I played some early cuts for my dad the other day and he was roaring. She’s a bigger part of series three than she was of the first two series. We couldn’t help but write more for her because she’s so brilliant.

So yes, I knew her, but like you, I was a fan first and a fan for ever. Don’t feel worse for me today than you feel for yourself. Actually feel a little bit worse for me, since I won’t get to have her act right into my face any more or goof around with her between takes.

Carrie was the only cast member Sharon and I would let improvise. (I say “let”; as if we could stop her. She let us put her in our show.) We’re a bit despotic and inflexible with our dialogue because we’re insane, but Carrie was more insane and would always, always make it funnier and better. In episode one of series two you can hear her singing an improvised song about areolae in the background of our daughter’s christening party.

And she was kind too. One day I was having a hard time because I was feeling guilty about being on set pretending to have a hard time managing a young family while my real-life wife tended to our three kids under the age of five, one of whom was a newborn. She was very sweet and understanding and the next day she brought me a tin of biscuits shaped like syringes and thermometers and other medical things and said she was “prescribing me cookies”.

Of course I loved her in Star Wars and When Harry Met Sally but the thing I watched her in the most was The Blues Brothers, where her character repeatedly tries to creatively and violently murder Jake and Elwood, played by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd respectively. Jesus was she beautiful in that movie, with her long chestnut hair, her impossibly beautiful brown eyes and her irresponsibly shiny lips. The per-scene budget for her lip gloss in The Blues Brothers must have been $25! (That movie came out in 1980, so $25 works out to roughly $830 in 2016 money.)

I spent my teenage years fantasising about a shiny-lipped Carrie Fisher trying to murder me and my fugitive brother one day … So naturally I tried to seduce Carrie when we finally did work together, especially after Variety called me “the poor man’s Harrison Ford, who is also fat”. I’d like to report that I was successful, but despite my begging her on many occasions, we never had sex, even though our onscreen mother/son chemistry was off the charts. We made her and Adam Driver’s sterile scenes in The Force Awakens look like bank transactions. Adam, if you’re reading this, you might want to consider spending some of your Star Wars money on acting lessons instead of Lamborghinis.

What I’m getting at here is that I revered Carrie until I met her and then I loved her. I’m smiling thinking about her. I hope you are too.