‘I've not got a problem with making myself look disgusting': the wild rise of Diane Morgan

The Guardian

7 days ago

Diane Morgan went vegan a few months ago, so naturally, we meet for lunch at a restaurant in central London that almost entirely serves cheese. It is a humid, muggy day. 'You don't often hear people use the word 'muggy' now,' Morgan says, when I mention it. 'How many people do you hear saying that, on a daily basis?' A pause. 'Under the age of 85, I mean.'
Morgan is famous for her deadpan style, which she has honed to perfection as the mockumentary host Philomena Cunk, and has put to use all over British TV, from the dour Liz in Motherland to Kath in Ricky Gervais's sitcom After Life, with a recent stint as the reporter Onya Doorstep in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Over a lovely looking cheese-free salad, she admits that she is becoming more of a hippy as she gets older. 'As I'm cascading towards the grave,' she laughs.
Morgan is here to talk about the surreal, anarchic Mandy, which she created, writes and stars in. It is 'pure stupidity', she says, gleefully, ahead of its fourth series. 'There's no meaning. You're not going to learn anything. I don't want to learn anything.' The episodes are barely 15 minutes long, and see Mandy try out various jobs and get-rich-quick schemes, as she is forced to navigate fatbergs, psychics, illicit medical procedures, Russian gangsters and plane hijackings.
Back in the day, Morgan and her friend Michael Spicer ('a YouTube sensation now') would meet up at a pub – upstairs, in an empty room, not at the bar, she clarifies – with a bag of wigs, to play around with characters. One of them became Mandy. Mandy first made an appearance on Craig Cash's short-lived 2016 sitcom Rovers. When the BBC asked Morgan if she had any ideas for a new comedy, Mandy staged a comeback. They filmed a 15-minute pilot, in which Mandy covets a white leather sofa, leading to a Princess Di makeover that clashes with an experimental medical trial. 'I never thought they'd pick it up, and I think that's why it was so mad,' she says. 'I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.'
It went out in 2019, and was soon picked up for a full series. 'I thought, fantastic, made it, and then thought, oh shit.' She was so nervous about it airing that she almost phoned the BBC and asked them to pull it. 'It felt really personal, in some ways,' she explains. In the new series, Mandy vomits ice-cream on to a small child's head and gets 'rancid lamb fat' injected into her backside. How personal are we talking? 'I felt like people were going to go, what the hell is that? And I'm sure a lot of people did. It's just what I felt like doing at the time, as a reaction to all those Fleabaggy dramas. Fleabag's brilliant, but because it was so successful, there were loads of other shows that were a bit like that.'
Mandy is not like that. Instead, it was inspired by more grotesque physical comedies such as Bottom. 'Where they're just beating each other up repeatedly. I couldn't think of a woman that had done that.' She wonders whether women don't want to make themselves look disgusting. 'I've not got a problem with that,' she laughs. 'Because that's what I want to see.'
In the first proper episode, Mandy gets a job in a banana factory, squashing spiders. I think about it every time I pick up a bunch at the supermarket. 'I was told that was an actual job in Bolton,' she insists. 'They would hand you a mallet and if the spider ran out, you'd just clobber it. That was a job! Otherwise, what do you do? Just let them run free?'
Morgan has done quite a few of the jobs that Mandy tries, it turns out. 'Chip shop, telesales, Avon lady, dental nurse, packing worming tablets. All kinds of stuff. I've been pretty terrible at all of them.' She grew up near Bolton, and had always wanted to act, but for a while, struggled to get into drama school. At one point, she and her friend Maxine Peake decided to have elocution lessons. 'We thought the reason we weren't getting into drama school was because we were so broad,' she says.
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How did those lessons go? 'Well … badly,' she laughs. 'But it's mad, isn't it, that the thing that was separating me out, I wanted to get rid of.' She realised 'far too late' what made her special. 'I think it was when I'd left drama school. I started doing standup, and then I started getting acting parts, and they were always miserable northerners.' It finally occurred to her that what she had been trying to suppress was exactly what people found funny. 'The flat, miserable noise of my voice.'
Morgan has played Philomena Cunk for over a decade, and in the past, she has said that the two are very similar. 'Basically the same,' she nods, today. But it sounds like there's more crossover with Mandy than you'd think. 'There's a lot of overlap there. I'm probably more like Cunk, because Mandy's quite brazen. I haven't got [Cunk's] social skills, because I didn't go to public school. She doesn't care, whereas I do care. That's the big difference.'
She will freely admit, though, that she loves an awkward moment. 'I'm completely happy in silences, as you can probably tell from Cunk. I revel in them, almost.' When she interviews experts for what looks like minutes on screen, she might have been talking to them for hours, waiting for the perfect response to the often mindless questions. 'Basically, it's an improvised conversation, because you never know when they might go, 'what do you think?'' She has to second guess what they might say, and work out where she might take it from there. 'If they completely fall into the trap I've set, it's like feeding strawberries to a donkey. It's great.'
Philomena Cunk is unexpectedly massive in the US. 'Oh my god, yeah, they love it.' Morgan has done the rounds on the late night talk shows; she got a standing ovation when she walked out on to the Stephen Colbert stage. 'It sounds ridiculous, saying it,' she laughs. 'I felt like one of the Beatles.' Cunk is so big on social media that people don't always realise she's a character from a TV show. Sometimes, when they meet Morgan, they call her 'the TikTok lady'
From 2016 to 2022, Morgan played Liz in the hectic parenting comedy Motherland. Have they asked her to be in its spinoff, Amandaland? 'No.' She leaves one of those perfect silences. 'Bit awkward,' she jokes. 'No, I think it would be weird if we'd all gone back into it, and called it Amandaland. It's a different show.' She hasn't seen it, solely for the reason that she doesn't watch much comedy. 'It feels too close to home. I can't switch my brain off from going, oh, I see what you did there. I just ruin it, because I can't enjoy things.' She prefers documentaries. 'I find documentaries really funny, especially ones from the 70s. There's one that's purely about people who have got struck by lightning. It's just superb.'
Surely Philomena Cunk has ruined documentaries for everyone? 'But they're still making them, exactly the same,' she says. 'They make shows and you think, this is exactly like Cunk! How can you do this?' Morgan recently appeared on the celebrity genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, which was surreal for a number of reasons. First, because Mandy had already done a spoof of it called Who Are You, Do You Think, and second, because it is full of Cunk-like documentary tropes. Morgan leans into the daftness of it, doing those long, distant walking shots, and pleading not to have to look over her shoulder for the opening credits. 'My mum said to my auntie, 'Diane's done Who Do You Think You Are, are you going to watch it?' And my auntie said, 'Depends what else is on'. Swear to God. Depends what else is on. None of them give a shit. Keeps me very grounded.'
Morgan loves Mandy's 15-minute episodes. 'You're in, you're out, you've got your life back. I don't want anything that's like, oh, this is 47 seasons and it doesn't get going until episode 16.' But she will soon be returning to half-an-hour with Ann Droid, the new comedy she has written with Sarah Kendall. A year ago, Morgan read an article about the possibility of robot carers for child-free older people in Japan. 'I thought, I don't have any kids. Shit, that'll be me, ending up with a robot.' It made her laugh so much that they sent the idea to the BBC, who said yes. 'Then we had to write it.' Worse, she has cast herself as the robot. 'It didn't occur to me that it would be difficult, over six weeks, to move like this,' she says, lifting her arms stiffly. She is currently in training with a movement coach. 'I spend an hour a day, walking around the house like a robot.' I can't believe your family don't care about what you do, I say. 'I know! They don't ask,' she shrugs. 'Not bothered.'
Mandy returns on Monday 21 July at 10pm on BBC Two.