Look carefully at an old episode of French and Saunders, and the spoof period-drama sketch The House of Idiot. In the opening crowd scenes, skipping along the cobbled streets in tweed coats and bonnets amid all the other extras, you might catch sight of three small girls. Meet Ella, daughter of Jennifer Saunders and Adrian Edmondson, and her sisters Beatrice and Freya.

“If they needed child extras we were always called in,” says Ella, now 23. “But it was babysitting too — if there was no one to look after us at home. There was a lot of hanging around on TV sets. My friends would say: ‘Why don’t you take me with you to the filming?’ And I’d say: ‘Because you don’t realise how boring it is!’ ”

Ella Edmondson has never been particularly impressed with the celebrity lifestyle. Lenny Henry was good fun at Sunday lunch, she concedes, “and Ben Elton was always a laugh — he’s my godfather . . .” But things never felt quite right until her parents decided, in 2001, to move the family to Devon for a bit of creative and personal space. “My dad kept sheep and spent a lot of time on his tractor,” she recalls. “He was quite the little farmer . . .”

Out in the country, Ella came into her own. By the age of 19 she’d left home and set herself up as a painter-decorator. She worked on “some really nice houses”, apparently, “and some new builds, grouting, puttying, lime-washing”. Her mother was fairly relaxed about the unusual choice of trade, but her father had other ideas. Ella had been writing and singing songs since she was ten years old. She was destined for a career in music.

Only in the topsy-turvy world of show business would a father extract his child from a perfectly sensible career in the construction industry and launch her on a world of late nights and booze with a guaranteed regular income of precisely no pence. Her father set up a record label, encouraged his daughter to make her first album, Hold Your Horses — a collection of sweet, robust, self-penned folk-pop songs featuring the talents of John McCusker and Kate Rusby — and got her on the festival scene. Now the pair of them are touring the country, with Ella supporting her father’s band, the Bad Shepherds. “It must be absolutely bloody awful having famous parents,” says Adrian Edmondson quietly.

We’re at Band on the Wall, the legendary Manchester venue so-named because, back in the day, the stage was positioned 12ft off the ground to prevent the musicians being “bottled” by the punters. In their student days, Edmondson and his long-time comedy partner Rik Mayall, whom he met at Manchester University, used to perform lunchtime theatre in here to an audience of about three. Their screaming farcical plays had titles such as The Church Bizarre: a Fête Worse than Death. Even then, Edmondson wanted to be a musician, “but there was no dossers’ course in music, so I had to do a dossers' course in drama,” he explains, twiddling the knobs on his mandolin. The Bad Shepherds, formed last year, are a folk quartet who specialise in novel, rustic reworkings of punk songs. Adrian — he no longer calls himself Ade — is serious about music. His soundcheck lasts an hour. Which is just as well because Ella is still not here.

“I have been seriously late to gigs two or three times,” she will confess with charming goofiness. “Through no fault of my own the M3 suddenly shuts. I have this perfect little country life in Devon and I get muddled if something comes along to spoil it”

And here she is, Ella Edmondson, the former builder, in a swirl of blonde hair and bangles, clattering into her father’s soundcheck in 6in heels, depositing a colossal red holdall, various magazines and a pair of cowboy boots, and radiating — as any grown up child does when paying the parents a whirlwind visit — a tangible air of chaos. The folk rendition of Talking Heads’ Pyscho Killer collapses and father and daughter are reunited in an exquisite, slightly awkward moment in which they don’t know what to say to one another because there are about ten people watching.

“My dad really works hard,” Ella says later over a glass of chardonnay. “My mum does too but it’s always in her head, and then it comes out in a rush at the last minute. When we were at home, she’d be working in her office and you’d go in and she was actually just playing solitaire on her computer.”

She talks like Saunders, with the same deep and rather luxurious voice, but she still seems very young — the effect of being required to talk about her parents more than the average 23-year-old would ever have to do. Saunders has been supportive of her music career — she used one of Ella’s most memorable ballads, Breathe, on the soundtrack of her series Jam and Jerusalem. “But she thinks I ought to go to more parties,” Ella admits. “She wants me to do the whole PR thing.”

At the family home in Devon, Ella learnt to play the guitar by watching her dad’s fingers on the fretboard. She used to entertain him with his favourite Kiss and Sid Vicious songs, while he tried to show an interest in Marilyn Manson.

“I always thought she would be a musician,” he says. “She was always so . . . I don’t know if it’s brave or naive. Or ‘braive’. She’s got this ability that I never really had, because I always went on pretending to be someone else. She goes on just as herself and makes people like her.”

He would say that — he’s her dad. But you can’t help but wonder: if Ella Edmondson makes it in the business, won’t any satisfaction be tarnished by the knowledge that her parents have got her there?

“If you’ve got famous parents, people are more likely to listen to you,” she agrees, “but they’re more likely to really want to hate you too. And I don’t blame them. I judge people all the f***ing time. Besides, my dad is a very good businessman. I trust him. And I know where he lives.

“Things had been a bit tense between us when I was decorating,” she continues — and that’s not a sentence you hear very often — “but now that I’m working with him, suddenly you realise your parents aren’t as anal as you thought they were.” Father and daughter are playing 26 dates in an intense 30-day period. Has Adrian ever attempted something like this with her before? “No, but I lived with her for 19 years,” he says quietly.

“I like being with her. All kids, when they reach about 18 they turn their back on you, not on purpose, but because there’s so many interesting things in the world. They don’t give you any of the attention you’ve had their whole life. So it’s nice when they look over their shoulder again and say, actually, you’re not too bad.”

For Ella it’s the start of a career. For him, it’s a new one. He recently said that he’d be happy never to pick up a pen again and leave the comedy behind for ever. “I’m gone already,” he says now, wistfully. “This is it. Most careers are kind of accidental anyway. Ending up doing drama at Manchester was kind of accidental. Ending up with Rik here in this particular building was accidental . . .”

Ella bounds into the dressing room to check that Jennifer Saunders is on the guest list. Here’s one career that wasn’t accidental.

Ella Edmondson supports the Bad Sheperds on tour until Nov 1

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