Diane Morgan goes ghost-hunting in some of the grand homes where she films her Philomena Cunk shows – and says she has witnessed paranormal activities.

’When I’m doing Cunk there’s a lot of setting up of cameras and so me and Liz Owens, who does the hair and makeup and is also big into ghosts, go hunting for ghosts,’ she said at a session of the BBC Comedy Festival in Liverpool yesterday.

’We’re often in these big old houses, so we take our EMF readers to see if there’s any activity. We’ve seen some really weird things, though, like huge chandeliers have started spinning.’ 

The comic has been obsessed with the paranormal since the age of 11,  after she saw a ghostly figure in a bedroom at her nan’s house, and has hosted a Radio 4 Extra archive programme on the subject.

Her production company is called Witchcraft Industries, but she revealed: ’I wanted to call it Witchcraft Pharmaceuticals but they wouldn’t let me do it.’

Morgan was at the event to launch Ann Droid – her forthcoming comedy, written with Sarah Kendall, in which she plays a care robot looking after a widow, played by Sue Johnson. Although the audience were sworn to secrecy about revealing anything about the show.

The comic said that generally when she is creating characters she starts with a voice or the look, explaining: ’If I see somebody who’s interesting, I’ll  file it away in my Rolodex in my head.’

And that’s how Mandy came about. ’I went into a pub one time and it was a woman with a huge beehive sitting in the corner and a massive dog next to her - like an Irish wolfhound - and a black eye.

’I got her outfits from one person on eBay, they were having a clear-out. All these clothes were fantastic.’

And despite the weird jobs her alter-ego finds herself doing in the BBC series, they are all drawn from real life.

’There’s an element of me there,’ Morgan said. ’All those jokes I did. My equivalent of smashing spiders in the banana factory was the worming tablet factory.’

Morgan said of the show: ‘I wanted to do something totally stupid because there are so many comedy-dramas’ – explaining that it was the pratfalls and physical scenes that come to her first, and she often turns to her husband, and the show’s producer Ben Caudell, to try to tie those scenes into a coherent plot.

She also explained that there were elements of herself in Cunk, too, saying:’I often feel like it’s the real me – it’s how I’d be if I didn’t have any social skills. If I was allowed to be bored and not retain any information.’

Speaking about how she was first drawn into comedy, Morgan recalled loving early favourites like Laurel and Hardy –  ’older people acting like idiots, not knowing what to do… I just found that really funny. 

’And especially people falling over. Comedy was very prized in our house, humour, over everything else. If you could make someone laugh, that meant more than anything. My parents really encouraged me, you know, to make little cassette tapes in my bedroom.’

That background helped her make other people laugh during drama lessons at school, which prompted her to go to drama school. ’There was no TikTok, no YouTube about then. It was either Edinburgh Festival or drama school.  I thought, well, suppose I go to drama school. I thought at the very least it’ll give me confidence and technique.’

’But on my first day I said to the head of the school, "I’m not interested in Shakespeare." Which was a mistake, they didn’t like that, but I just wanted to make it clear I was only there to get better at comedy.  

’I wanted to make it clear I wasn’t going to be doing Lady Macbeth. So then they cast me as Lady Macbeth.’

But she joked that she got ’big laughs’ from the tormented role.

More worrying was another exercise: ’ They don’t do this any more but for two weeks of the year, they send you into Epping Forest to play Jews and Nazis. I was a Jew and they shot my husband in front of me!

’It actually worked. Over two weeks we would improvise non-stop and the Germans would get us up at 4am walking around  on our hands and knees, barking like dogs. And after two weeks, you just assume that’s your life.

’Then they shot my husband, a doctor, in front of me and I just burst out crying. I knew it wasn’t  real but it’s so shocking it worked, it was like brainwashing.’

She said that at the time she was there, drama schools tried to ’knock anything that’s individual’ out of their students, including encouraging her to lose her accent for a supposedly more 'neutral' recevied pronounciation. 

But then she did a stand-up comedy course run by Logan Murray, and said: ‘What was so great about the comedy course is that it worked on finding out what was funny about you.'