‘Suddenly I was a celebrity. I didn’t want to be!’ Sue Johnston on fame, loneliness and her new robot pal

She’s been a soap icon, a Royle and even a zombie pensioner. Now the actor is starring in Ann Droid, Diane Morgan’s madcap comedy about an elderly woman and her cybernetic companionSue Johnston is the kind of actor who usually can’t stand seeing herself on screen, but for Ann Droid she made an exception. The new sitcom by Diane Morgan and Sarah Kendall stars the 82-year-old as a recent widow whose son hires a humanoid robot called Linda (played with delightful uncanniness by Morgan herself) to assist her after he moves out. The results are initially farcical: Linda is a dated – and therefore relatively cheap – model who lacks the intelligence of newer variants and attempts to cheer people up by blasting Cotton Eye Joe at them. Yet the pair soon become inseparable. Johnston describes the show as “rich with humour and love”. When she watched it back, she found it so absorbing that “I forgot it was me – I very rarely do that and I just enjoyed it.”Ann Droid is wor