Diane Morgan is back with One’s new sitcom Ann Droid, and the central joke is mechanical, not nostalgic: she plays a secondhand robot built to care for an elderly widow. Morgan, 50, says she pitched the idea after reading about robot carers being rolled out in Japan, then braced herself for a no.
Instead, she got a series and a new lead role that extends a run of deadpan TV characters built over 15 years. For a performer already linked to Philomena Cunk, Mandy and Liz in Motherland, Ann Droid adds a different kind of comic machine: one where the voice is human, but the body is not.
Bloomsbury, Bobby and the pitch
Speaking over Zoom from her Bloomsbury flat, where she lives with Ben Caudell, Morgan also detoured into a less glamorous bit of domestic work: Bobby, her toy poodle, needs eye drops after an ulcer led to a corneal graft. He is wearing an inflatable collar at the moment, which feels closer to farce than development notes, but it fits the same household that produced the show.
That pitch came from a practical idea, not a sketch-room whim. Morgan said the robot-carer concept started with that report from Japan, and she took it to the without much expectation. “We pitched it to the and I didn’t really think they’d go for it,” she said.
Sue Johnson and Linda
Ann Droid centres on an elderly widow played by Sue Johnson, whose adult son moves out and leaves her with Linda, a secondhand AnnDroid Z58/100 Basic Eldercare Robot. Linda’s stiff Star Trek-style uniform and Anne Robinson haircut do a lot of the visual work before she says a line, which is exactly the point of Morgan’s comedy: the design itself becomes part of the gag.
Written with Sarah Kendall, the series gives Morgan another lead built around deadpan timing rather than broad punchlines. Her previous characters have been gathered over roughly 15 years, and this one pushes her into a cleaner high-concept format that One can market on premise alone.
The acceptance problem
What changed for Morgan was not just approval but expectation. “The penny dropped. I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to have to play a robot now. I don’t know how to pla” she said, capturing the snap from casual pitch to actual assignment.
That is the useful part of the story for viewers: the show is not coming from a safe imitation of her older work. It is a new character built from a real-world care-tech idea, a widow’s empty house and a lead actor who initially assumed the answer would be no. For Morgan, the surprise is the job itself; for One, the bet is whether her clipped comic timing still lands when the joke wears a metal shell.
