Diane Morgan: ‘If I was middle-class and I’d been to Cambridge, people would have had more confidence in me’ – UK Times

Diane Morgan is undoubtedly one of the most recognisable faces in British comedy. With the big, blue eyes of a Tim Burton character and a shiny auburn mane (where’s her Claudia Winkleman-esque shampoo deal?), it’s no surprise that she’s regularly recognised by fans in the street – and depending on the demographic, she can usually guess where they know her from.

Men in their forties, apparently, know her as the idiotic interviewer Philomena Cunk from Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe. For mums, it’s usually Motherland, where she starred as sardonic single parent Liz. “And if it’s a gay man, it’ll be Mandy,” she chuckles, referring to the calamitous beehived job seeker in her eponymous sitcom. “I’ve got such nice fans. They’re always really lovely.”

It’s a rare feat for an actor to add three cult characters to their comedy arsenal in just 15 years. Each one is markedly distinct, but all possess the unsmiling, unbothered, deadpan demeanour that’s characteristic of Morgan’s TV creations. Even on Last One Laughing UK, she kept up the act – managing (for the most part) to keep a straight face on the show where it matters most, and creating one of the best TV moments of the year with just a fart machine and a stony rendition of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”.

The real Morgan couldn’t be more different. Speaking over Zoom from her Bloomsbury flat – which she shares with her partner, the BBC Comedy commissioning editor Ben Caudell – Morgan is animated, warm, and surprisingly cheerful given she’s juggling a press junket with her toy poodle Bobby’s demanding medication schedule. “I’m constantly doing eye drops for my dog, which he violently hates,” sighs the actor, who is (unbelievably) 50. “He had an ulcer on his eye, so he had to have a corneal graft. He’s got an inflatable collar on at the moment.”

She has what the publicist describes as a “hard out” after 40 minutes to take Bobby back to the vet, and apologises for joining the Zoom late, having struggled to find a meeting link. Ironic, considering she’s starring in BBC One’s new sitcom Ann Droid as an artificially intelligent humanoid robot. Written with Australian comedian Sarah Kendall, the zeitgeisty comedy follows an elderly widow, played by Sue Johnson, whose adult son moves out and leaves her with Linda, a vacant, secondhand “AnnDroid Z58/100 Basic Eldercare Robot” with a stiff Star Trek-style uniform and an Anne Robinson haircut.

Morgan came up with the idea after reading about robot carers being rolled out in Japan. “I was talking to my friend [producer Pippa Brown] about this, and we were laughing because I don’t have kids, so obviously I’ll be looked after by a robot when I’m older,” she says. “We pitched it to the BBC and I didn’t really think they’d go for it.” She slightly panicked, then, when they did. “The penny dropped. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have to play a robot now. I don’t know how to play a robot.’ It’s harder than you think.”

She enlisted the help of Dan O’Neill – a movement director who choreographed the synths on Channel 4’s robot drama Humans – and he turned her into the unsettlingly rigid cyborg. “I thought, ‘What am I doing being a robot? I’ve no business being a robot.’ But Dan gave me the confidence,” she says – although embracing her inner android came with a cost.

“Early on, I thought it’d be really good if I didn’t blink, but it was a stupid decision. Once I’d done it, I was locked into that. I’d be outside sometimes, and the wind would be blowing in my eyes and there’d be tears rolling down my face,” she adds, hooting with laughter. “I had these really thick, blue contact lenses, and I thought, ‘That’ll look really robotic,’ but again, it was really painful.”

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Much like the rest of us, Morgan is already sick of hearing about the AI revolution. “It’s everywhere now and I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she says, glumly. “There’ll be some good and there’ll be some bad. I don’t think they’ll kill us all, but you never know. We insinuate that in the show, that Linda is one of an older brand of robots that were recalled because of some sort of atrocity that happened with them, and it’s never really gone into.”

While Ann Droid couldn’t be more topical right now, it’s harder than ever to get comedies commissioned. Fewer sitcoms are making it onto our screens, and those that do seem to have a limited shelf life, with Rosie Jones’s Pushers, ITV’s Piglets, and Bridget Christie’s The Change having recently been axed. “We’re really lucky that we got Ann Droid made,” says Morgan.

A lot has changed since she started her career in 2002, when she was a struggling actor, fresh out of Essex’s East 15 acting school. She landed her first role that year after fellow Boltonian Maxine Peake, whom she had bonded with while auditioning for drama schools, encouraged her to contact the up-and-coming Peter Kay.

“I thought, ‘What can I lose?’ So I wrote to him and said, ‘I love what you do. If you ever make anything else, I’m happy to do anything. I’ll make the sandwiches, hold the coats.’ God love him, he remembered,” she smiles. Morgan was cast in Kay’s Phoenix Nights, playing background character Dawn. “He gave me this little part and I was so grateful. I’ll never forget that. That was really nice of him.”

She spent the next 10 years picking up the occasional TV gig while making ends meet with various odd jobs that undoubtedly served as inspiration for Mandy – packing up worming tablets in a factory, being a dental assistant, selling Avon, peeling potatoes at a chip shop. It’s hard to picture Morgan pre-fame without being hit with visions of her fictitious pouting wonder at work, accidentally dropping one of her huge hoop earrings in a deep fryer or installing leopard-print veneers in the mouth of an unfortunate dental patient.

Morgan – who grew up in the coal-mining town of Farnworth, with a physiotherapist dad and a stay-at-home mum – thinks things might have been different had she been as self-assured as her Oxbridge comedy contemporaries.

“When I was younger, I didn’t have much confidence, and I think that came across. I didn’t have the social skills,” she says. “I could tell that people had a lack of trust in what I was doing. I think if I was middle-class and I’d been to Cambridge, people would have had more confidence in what I was doing. I don’t know. I certainly don’t think I’ve been given opportunities because I’m working-class. I’ve proved myself.”

Since then, the rulebook on how to get into British comedy has been torn up and digitised. Half of Saturday Night Live UK’s young cast cut their comedy teeth on TikTok. Comedians who rack up millions with their social media skits – like Munya Chawawa and Lucia Keskin – are getting Channel 4 and BBC shows. If that had been the case when Morgan started out in comedy, it “would have been a dream”.

“When I was starting, I’d have to go to the Edinburgh Festival. That would be your only option if you wanted to do comedy. But now, because of Instagram and YouTube and everything, it’s a great way to try out characters and sketches and build up an audience,” she says. “That’s where you’re finding new people. TV comedy gets less money and less attention than the big dramas do. Maybe it’ll just move completely over to social media in a few years. Who knows?”

At 37, Morgan landed what would become one of her career-defining roles: the permanently pensive documentary host parody, Philomena Cunk. Making her debut in Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe in 2013, Cunk picked up a cult following by making experts squirm with ridiculous questions like “Why are pyramids that shape? Is it to stop homeless people sleeping on them?” and “If Samuel Pepys was alive today, do you think he’d be doing Snapchat?” Many of the experts still go in thinking Cunk is a documentary presenter from the BBC – not a send-up of that genre of British broadcaster.

After seven Cunk specials (including one yet to be released), Morgan has no problem embracing the cringe. “I revel in awkwardness, and if someone seems awkward in an interview, I love that, because it makes good telly,” she says. “Everything’s so slick now, and people are so used to being on camera that everything’s safe. It feels like everyone knows what they’re doing, nothing’s going to go wrong. So when someone suddenly looks uncomfortable on TV, it’s fascinating. It’s like going back to the 1970s when people weren’t used to it, and you see people on camera looking really awkward.”

Ten years on, Cunk is still catching her perplexed interviewees off guard, despite the show’s increasing popularity (“a lot of the boffins don’t really watch TV”) – but will there come a time when she hangs up the ponytailed presenter’s blazer? “Maybe there’ll be an 80-year-old Cunk. I’ll be like Attenborough,” she laughs. “It depends; would Cunk be employed as an 80-year-old woman?”

She has similar plans for Mandy, the sour-faced star of her BBC sitcom, who’ll be back on our screens this Christmas. Last year’s special – which the broadcaster previously teased would see the character “dabble in global diplomacy” – was pulled at the last minute from the schedules so that certain sections could be “updated”. The Mirror later reported that the original cut of the special saw Mandy meet Russian leader Vladimir Putin before “garrotting him with a cheese wire”.

Morgan can’t say much about the special being pulled, except that it was, erm, “because of world events”. Over the years, we’ve watched Mandy head to Mars, date Paddy McGuinness, and work at a banana-processing factory, but the one time Morgan tries something political, it proves “too controversial”. “I think they decided it was for the right reasons,” she says. “It was a complete accident. I’m never one of these comedians that tries to be topical – it’s just not what I do. It’s completely out of keeping with me.”

Despite the schedule change, Morgan has had a busy year, with more Cunk on Cinema coming out, a part in Ricky Gervais’s upcoming comedy Alley Cats, and now Ann Droid, on which she reunited with her Motherland co-star Paul Ready after the school-gates sitcom ended in 2022. “He’s just so good,” she gushes. “Did you see him play a murderer in Utopia? When he turned up to the table reading of Motherland, I was like, ‘How is he going to play Kevin? He’s a murderer.’ And then, after he played Kevin, it’s like, ‘How did he ever play a murderer? He’s Kevin!’ His range is incredible.”

Fans followed some of the parents to secondary school in the brilliant, Bafta-nominated spin-off Amandaland, which focuses on Lucy Punch’s snooty mumfluencer Amanda after her move to South Harlesden (SoHa) post-divorce. However, Morgan can’t see herself making a cameo as the sarcastic Liz in the spin-off.

“I think it’d be a bit weird, wouldn’t it?” she says, hesitantly. “Lucy and I never really had many scenes together. It was always me, Anna [Maxwell Martin, who played Julia] and Paul against her. Sometimes you can tell if they’ve gone, ‘Let’s just get them in there because they were in Motherland.’ There would have to be a really good reason to do it.”

Morgan may have left Liz behind in west London to become the dead-eyed droid Linda, but she already has her sights set on her next big character – and it’s bound to widen her audience beyond 40-year-old men, mums and the gay community. “Do you know what I’d really love to do? Something a bit paranormal and spooky. Something a bit creepy,” she grins.

So from robots to ghosts? “Yeah – I only do high-concept stuff now,” says Morgan, that deadpan look briefly returning, before she breaks out into a full-on chortle.

‘Ann Droid’ starts at 9.30pm on iPlayer and BBC One on Friday 17 July. All episodes will be available from 6am on iPlayer