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Diane Morgan is the writer and star of this new comedy about a hapless, jobless heroine whose daft adventures always end in calamity – if not arson
I have long nurtured the theory that we will know we have reached true sexual equality in this – so far unpromising – world only when women are, in the same numbers, allowed to be as daft as men. In public, on screens, as a paid, professional job. Do you remember how weird it felt watching Smack the Pony and seeing Doon Mackichan, Fiona Allen and Sally Phillips hurling themselves about like utter loons? It was a glorious abandonment of uncountable numbers of shackles and seeing it felt like a liberation of some kind. See also the unforgettable insanity of Michelle Gomez’s Sue White in Green Wing a bit later on – and there is something of it, too, in the glorious gurning and gusto that suffuses Derry Girls. A sense of sisters doing it for themselves, perhaps, and to hell with what the world expects to see from them.
I hope it is a theory that rings true outside my own head, because I would like you to consider a new contender for a place in the nascent tradition: Mandy (BBC Two). It is written and directed by its star, Diane Morgan, the mistress of the deadpan arts who is known for Philomena Cunk, the sub-moronic interviewer and thorn in the side of any expert/celebrity without a sense of humour, and Liz, the icy blade cutting through the overheated panic of other parents in Motherland. Continue reading...