Diane Morgan

Watch Liz at the school gate in Motherland (2017). Everyone else is performing: Amanda with the blow-dry and the kitchen, Anne agreeing, Julia sweating through the run to the bell. Liz stands slightly apart, smokes, lets her children go feral and says the thing the rest of the playground is thinking, in a voice with nothing in it. Morgan does not push a single line. She waits, says something short and awful, and the scene has to start again around her.

It took a long while for anyone to notice what that voice could do. Morgan trained at East 15, took a first television part in Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights (2001), started stand-up in 2004 and worked a sketch double act with Joe Wilkinson, and for a decade the accent and the background counted against her rather than for her. Then in 2013 Charlie Brooker put her in front of a camera on Weekly Wipe as Philomena Cunk, a presenter who knows nothing and asks about it with complete confidence, and the flatness found its use. The Cunk mockumentaries followed. So did Kath in Ricky Gervais's After Life (2019), and from 2019 Mandy, which she created, wrote, directed and stars in.

The Cunk act is easy to describe and hard to do. The joke is not the stupid question; it is that Morgan's face does not move while the expert opposite her decides whether to answer it. She has said herself that even when she tries to sound enthusiastic it comes out sarcastic, because it is just flat, and she is right, and she has been clever enough to write towards that rather than away from it. In Motherland the same stillness works as ballast. Punch's Amanda arrives with the knife half a second behind the smile; Morgan simply declines to be interested, which is funnier and takes less effort. We laughed at Liz more than at anyone else in that show, and it was the relieved kind of laugh, the one you give when somebody finally says it out loud and does not care who heard.

The limit is plain. Flatness is one note, and Morgan has so far chosen parts that need exactly that note: the dim, the checked-out, the hapless. Whether she can be flat and frightened, or flat and in love, we have not yet seen her asked to be, and Mandy is her own writing, so nobody has asked. Ann Droid is next, in 2026, and the title suggests she knows precisely what people think she does.

Start with Motherland, and count how few words she is given per episode against how many of the best laughs are hers.