Multiple personality disorder

Even before the interview starts Ronni Ancona puts her foot in it.

Today, with her tied-back hair, shiny silver bangles, manicured nails and neatly mascara-d lashes, she looks convincingly together. But, once she starts speaking, she becomes a whirl of nervous energy, scratching her neck, inadvertently flicking snippets of salad from her fork into her hair and, in particularly animated moments, knocking the table so fiercely I want to reach out and steady it.

"I’m a desperately clumsy woman," she revealed in a recent interview for her ITV series The Sketch Show. "People are just amazed at how clumsy I am. Henry Normal [poet, comic and writing partner for Steve Coogan and Caroline Aherne] says he keeps seeing me at the Tube station with the entire contents of my bag on the floor, looking for my purse or whatever. I’m very, very accident-prone."

The chaos extends to her words too, which she enunciates in an unbridled burr she explains as anglicised Scots. "When we’re filming I’m iiiiiiiiin the make-up chaaaaair very earrrrrly, probably by five or quarterrrrrr past five. It’s verrrrry tirrrrring." she says, in a breathy, Monroe-esque drawl that sounds oddly girlish for a 33-year-old.

"I’m very excitable but I think that’s because I am actually self-conscious and quite shy," she admits. "Most people have this misconception that if you’re shy or insecure you never say anything but I think you can hide your shyness in other ways. All comedians have freakish personalities. The more confident and cool someone is, the quieter they are, whereas I need a lot of reassurance. I want everyone to like me."

In fact, it’s hard not to like Ancona. Having braved the stand-up circuit to win the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year in 1993, she had everyone from Rory Bremner to Steve Coogan vying to get her on their shows and everyone from Rhona Cameron to Graham Norton vying to be her friend ("they all make me laugh. I’m a bit of a comedy tart"). And, next week, she returns to BBC1 for a new, prime-time series of Big Impression. Yet, for someone so obviously good at what she does, she just can’t seem to stop putting herself down.

Ordering a salad, she jokes it’s "a very light one. The waiter looked at my bum and said ‘yes, a very light one’". Of filming, she says she arrives "looking quite horrible - people sort of look and say, ‘God, what’s that?’". Then there’s her flat. "Oh man alive, you wouldn’t believe it. It’s such a mess that if it was designed for a set, they’d probably say, ‘No, that’s too much.’ Even for Withnail and I." She can’t talk about impersonating Britney Spears without countering, "That was a challenge. I’ve never gone that young before. It’ll be funny, anyway, that’s guaranteed." And, admitting to a nose-straightening job she once had, she jokes that her friends now call up and ask for Ronni Ann Conker, after a Mirror headline.

But underneath all the insecurity she’s genuinely entertaining. When asked how she went from studying design to comedy, she deadpans, "Well, I always wanted to be a vet," later explaining that she’s a bit obsessive about animals but, emotionally, not good with them. "I just cry. I don’t think I would have been right," she ponders. "I was always creatively good at art and design and English and I realised that was what my temperament suited. I mean, me as a surgeon, your life in my hands? I wouldn’t be your first choice, would I? You’d go private, wouldn’t you?"

Fortunately, for the TV-viewing public, Ancona decided that design wasn’t right either and opted for comedy instead. Although for a while she was known only as Alistair McGowan’s other half, these days - thanks to programmes like Steve Coogan’s Sketch Show - she is building a fan base of her own. Tap in "Ronni Ancona" on the internet and you’ll find plenty of unofficial websites singing her praises as a skilled impressionist (although it has to be said there also seems to be a separate fanclub for her cleavage).

"I think I’d always wanted to do comedy but I just hadn’t had the courage," she says. "I used to do impressions when I was quite young. My first was a very bad one of Miss Piggy. It was bizarre because I was a very, very shy kid but I also did this thing with a couple of friends called Pots People, a clever play on the group Pan’s People. It was brilliantly conceived," she laughs. "We had this cardboard box which was cut out at the front to look like a television and we’d put it on a table and then people would get up and push the button - there was only one channel - and we’d start being a newsreader. Then someone else would press the button and another person would pop up doing something else. God, I think I was quite obsessed with comedy."

There can’t have been much else to do in Troon, where she remembers having an unhappy childhood. "It’s not Troon’s fault, I was just a very sad kid," she sighs. "I had very dark moods and I was a very shy and strange-looking child, like a little creature. Lots of people said I’d grow into my face and I thought, ‘What the hell does that mean and will it happen soon?’ You know you see these little girls who look like dolls? I didn’t."

Instead she day-dreamed, going for walks with her mum along the beach and telling stories she made up on the way. "I was obsessed with Dustin Hoffman," she says. "From Troon beach you can see Arran and on an incredibly clear day you can see the tip of Ireland and, of course, for me that was New York and America and Dustin Hoffman." She also watched a lot of comedy, from Steve Martin and Woody Allen to Morecambe and Wise, Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News.

For someone who was so crushingly shy and having problems growing up, a small town was a hard place to be and she’d escape to Glasgow whenever she could. "My mother used to work at the Ayr Gaiety doing scene painting, and at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow. At the time the rest of the country had this image of Glasgow being a really rough place, which was quite false. To me it was a really magical place because I used to go there and watch the panto or the ballet and think it was just the height of exoticism. It was a really big treat when Mum took us for a Danish pastry at Fraser’s in Buchanan Street."

At 16, Ronni escaped Troon, and Scotland, and eventually settled in south London, working her way onto the comedy circuit. But despite her early success with Miss Piggy, she insists becoming an impressionist was an accident rather than a career choice. "I always did lots of voices but that’s all I was," she explains, "a comic who did voices. Then, when I got asked to go on tour with Rory Bremner, before I knew it, I was an impressionist and thinking ‘Oh my God, when did that happen?’"

Watching Ancona on screen now, forcefully chiding Neil Hamilton (McGowan) as Christine Hamilton, or scrunching up her face in perfect East End mimicry of Peggy Mitchell, it’s hard to think of her as anything other than an impressionist. What she really wants to do, though, is comedy films, "even if it’s just a cameo, because that’s been my dream since I was a little girl watching Madeleine Khan and Elaine May and Diane Keaton. And I love Woody Allen. It’s never going to happen but it would be a dream to be in a Woody Allen film." In the meantime, she’s working on writing projects of her own and trying to move away from being "the girl who does Posh Spice". Once the new series of Big Impression finishes, that is.

Most people would probably do all they could to avoid an ex, let alone work with them, but Ancona and McGowan, who went out together for three years, they insist they have the ideal working relationship. "We get on very well. We do have disagreements - people can be shocked by how we talk to each other, but that’s because we know each other so well," insists Ancona. "We split up a long time before the series started and I think one of the reasons we stopped going out with each other was because we realised we were creative partners and not, you know... We thought, ‘Oh, this is what it’s supposed to be, not that.’"

As far as creative partnerships go, it seems pretty successful. As well as ever-increasing viewing figures, and a recent award from the Variety Club, even the people they impersonate can’t get enough of them. "We were recently invited to meet the Beckhams but Ali and I were too scared - we were worried about how much older and uglier we are than both of them," jokes Ancona, quickly adding that Carol Smillie even has a bit of her impression in her own showreel. "Scots always have a really good sense of humour about it and I know how annoying it is hearing other people doing bad Scottish accents," she laughs.

Apart from bad Scottish accents, one thing the pair deliberately steer away from is politics. It’s partly because the show is "on BBC1 at 8.30pm and not BBC2 or Channel 4 at 10pm", but it’s also because, apart from giving people a laugh, the idea was to comment on how celebrity-obsessed we’ve all become. "You know you see these awards ceremonies where it’s, like, woman of the year awarded to Caprice?" asks Ancona. "I mean, I’ve got nothing against these people but you think ‘f-ing Nora, shouldn’t it really be going to someone who’s given up 15 years of her life working for Mdecins Sans Frontires or something?’ That’s what we are trying to comment on.

Not putting the boot in but just examining it."

Whether it’s down to clever social commentary or simply her skill as an impressionist, Ancona has, ironically, just won a New TV Talent Award. "These newcomer awards are quite funny because we’ve all been doing it for about 10 years," she laughs. "I mean, it’s an honour to win but the people who’ve made it have been working their arses off for years. For people like Jo Brand and Mark Lamarr, doing gigs night after night, it was a really hard slog and they’re there for a reason."

For Ancona, comedy isn’t something where you emerge funny at 18. "If you’re in your late 20s or early 30s as a comedian and you’ve just started to make it, that’s quite normal. I died a death so terrible one night that all the comics on the bill called me up the next day to check that I hadn’t killed myself. Even the promoter rang me up and said, ‘Are you all right?’ Before I went on the compre had started a big discussion about football and the audience were just screaming at each other and I had to walk on in the middle of all this. They didn’t want to know. They just started screaming a barrage of insults - eff off, get yer tits out - you know. The fact is that comedy’s hard to break in to."

It’s especially tough if you’re a woman. "Women have a lot of catching up to do," she says, adamantly. "I don’t think there’s a conspiracy against us but it’s difficult. Every time a Caroline Aherne, French and Saunders or Victoria Wood comes along you think it’s great that women are being taken seriously. But somehow they just become honorary blokes. Obviously there are some brilliant female comedians around and comedy has moved on from the days of Howard Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy, when women were just something to be tied to railway tracks, but people still categorise you more. No one ever asks Alistair about his looks or whether he thinks he’s attractive. But Garry Bushell recently said he couldn’t understand why this girl wasn’t doing as well as me because she was prettier than I am. And I just thought, what on earth has that got to do with anything and where would you ever see that written about two male comedians? I found that so hurtful.

"The thing is, I don’t think people like to see a woman make a fool of herself and in order to be a great comic - and I do not put myself in that category - you need to be able to make a fool of yourself." And, perhaps, put your foot in it occasionally.

The new series of Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression is on BBC1 at 8.30pm on Fridays.