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Diane Morgan is one of the country's current queens of comedy. Her brilliant turns in shows like Motherland, Mandy and Last One Laughing reveal just how great she is at comic writing, acting and improv.
Currently riding high on our screens as humanoid robot Linda in the delightful Ann Droid, only Diane could mastermind something that perfectly satirises the state of the nation and the AI takeover, while touchingly covering themes like grief and loneliness.
However, it's a good thing that Diane got a break into the industry she's so successful in, because a stint working in a dentist's before she made it big nearly ended in disaster.
Appearing on BBC Radio 2 to chat to host Rylan Clark (who makes a brilliant cameo in Ann Droid,) Diane recalls the hilarious true story that leaves Rylan incredulous.
Rylan reveals, "Diane accidentally knocked out a patient's front tooth while working as a dental assistant."
Not believing this, he asks her to clarify. Diane responds with, "All right, yea, I knocked someone's tooth out," with her typical deadpan demeanour.
"Why did you knock someone's tooth out?" Rylan asks, horrified and his voice rising in octaves.
Diane explains that she was "daydreaming through the window" at the time of the incident, holding the aspirator - the device to suction out debris from the patient's mouth during procedures - in her hand.
Realising the dentist had been calling her name to get her attention, the actress shares that she "came to" from her daydream and "shoved" the aspirator into the patient's mouth "with such force, that I knocked the cap off their front tooth."
With his hands covering his mouth in disbelief, Rylan needs to know what happens next.
"It was lying in the middle of their tongue," Diane replies, fairly nonchalantly. She continues, "The dentist looked at me like, 'That's not good, you're fired.'"
Incredibly, Diane wasn't actually fired. The story ends with the dentist "gluing it back on," and "everything was fine."
Knowing that being a dental assistant definitely wasn't for her, and acting definitely was, Diane revealed more about getting her break into industry during a recent interview with The Independent.
Struggling to find work after leaving Essex’s East 15 acting school, fellow actress Maxine Peake encouraged Diane to get in touch with Peter Kay to see if he'd help her get a foot in the door.
She wrote to him to say, "I love what you do. If you ever make anything else, I’m happy to do anything. I’ll make the sandwiches, hold the coats."
He remembered, and gave her a small role in Phoenix Nights, playing background character Dawn. "He gave me this little part and I was so grateful. I’ll never forget that. That was really nice of him," she recalls.
For the next 10 years, Diane balanced picking up other small acting roles with regular jobs to pay the bills. Reading like an episode list from her hit show Mandy, these included packing worming tablets, selling Avon and peeling potatoes at a chip shop.
During this time, the infamous incident at the dentist's occurred while she took a job there as an assistant.
The actress believes her working class roots stopped her getting some of the acting roles she definitely could've nailed.
"I think if I was middle-class and I’d been to Cambridge, people would have had more confidence in what I was doing," she says.
Diane concludes, "I certainly don’t think I’ve been given opportunities because I’m working-class. I’ve proved myself."
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