Sue Johnston says the path that led to Brookside and The Royle Family began at 13, when she played a witch in a school play in Prescot and decided she wanted to act. Now 82, she is returning to the in Ann Droid, carrying a career that started with one school-stage moment and has lasted long enough to reach another new role.
“I was only 13 and funnily enough I was playing a witch and I just knew that I wanted to be an actor. I knew from then and I’ll never forget that moment,” she said in Liverpool. That memory is the cleanest marker in her story: a child in Prescot making a decision that later fed into a run of television work most viewers now know through Brookside and The Royle Family.
Prescot to Liverpool 5
“But I didn't know really what being an actor was in the 1950s, I was a tax inspector in Liverpool 5. I was the worst tax inspector - if it was your tax, I'm sorry - you probably never paid it,” she said. The line matters because it sits between the childhood decision and the career that followed: Johnston did not leap straight from the school play into TV, but moved through ordinary work before the screen roles arrived.
She also said, “The office was on the corner of Mathew Street so I spent all my days in the Cavern.” That detail places her working life inside Liverpool’s cultural geography, with the tax office and the later job at North End Music Stores, also known as NEMS, both woven into the same period before her screen career took shape.
Ann Droid and Diane Morgan
Johnston said she wanted to be part of Ann Droid because Diane Morgan wrote it: “I wanted to be part of it because Diane wrote it and I'm such a fan and a friend of hers, so when she sent me the script, it was just joyful and I thought ‘yes, thank you very much, I’ll have that!’” She added, “There's also a lot of love in it, there's such a warmth and friendship about it all, and that comes from Diane's writing, which says a lot about how she is as a human being. It's a very special script.”
Ann Droid is set three years in the future and pairs Johnston with Diane Morgan. Johnston plays Sue, a grieving widow who enlists the help of a robot carer named Linda after a nasty fall, a role that keeps her on screen at 82 while still leaning on the dry timing that made Barbara Royle one of her best-known parts in The Royle Family.
Royle Family to
Johnston’s career span is unusual because it runs from Prescot school stage work to a new comedy without losing the Liverpool connection that has always framed her public life. She spoke at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool during the Comedy Festival in Liverpool, where the childhood memory and the current project sat in the same conversation.
For viewers, the immediate takeaway is simple: Johnston is not just revisiting where she started; she is still being cast in fresh television work built around her voice and range. The school play explains the start, but Ann Droid shows the ending is nowhere near written yet.
