Hull's Debra Stephenson brings her impressions to Leeds City Varities and Scarborough Spa Theatre

Now she returns to Yorkshire to perform her latest show, The Many Voices of Debra Stephenson, at Leeds City Varieties on Friday and Scarborough Spa Theatre on Saturday.

To this day, though, her father is her “silent partner in comedy” who she continues to run her material past.

“Mum used to make the costumes and get me the wigs and all of that sort of thing and then dad would always write material,” she says from her home in Devon.

“They would both practise with me, hear me say my lines and everything, and my dad would help me with a tape recorder or a video cassette recorder (to) forensically listen for everything and watch everything to see how somebody was speaking and then copy. So it was a family thing, really, and it still is to a certain extent. My mum and my dad, to be fair, are my number one fans, and my cheerleaders if you like. My dad did impressions so it was like second nature to me in a way,” she says.

Where most parents teach children nursery rhymes, she says that impressions were her family’s version.

“For me it was: doesn't everybody do voices?”

At 13 she appeared alongside Les Dennis at Churchill’s cabaret club near her home with her turn as Mrs Thatcher. “My parting shot was,” she says, transforming into the former Prime Minister, “I must go now, I have a new hospital to close”.

She had been entering talent competitions through her childhood and in 1987 appeared on Bob Monkhouse’s Opportunity Knocks.

It was the host who also inadvertently encouraged her to develop other theatrical skills.

Stephenson, 51, says: “Bob Monkhouse had actually done an interview about Opportunity Knocks, and in that interview I remember reading - he sort of gave me this advice in a secondary way - because he’d been asked about the various contestants and he said: ‘I think Debra Stephenson would do very well, if she diversifies her talent’. And at the time, I didn't even know what that meant. I was only 14,” she says. “He'd said (it) because there's never that much work just for impressionists because it's so niche and I think that was a really, really brilliant piece of advice.”

During her school years she had taken drama lessons with Honor Pallant, a teacher who still runs the Spin Off Productions theatre group in Hull.

Later, she delved into the alternative comedy scene.

"I'd met really inspiring people like Steve Coogan and John Thomson and Harry Enfield on Spitting Image. I thought ‘this is the way to go’ and I started going to see them perform and thought ‘yes, this is it’. So I moved to Manchester and I did Edinburgh Festival and lots of student comedy gigs, but I did realise at that time (I was) probably limited because of my writing...my lack of experience.”

In the middle of all this, she met her husband James Duffield and lived in Glasgow for a while, but went on to train at the drama school at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Stephenson is now known for dramatic roles, too, including the memorably psychotic Shell Dockley in Bad Girls, Frankie Baldwin in Coronation Street and Jeni Sinclaire in Holby City.

She also played Diane Powell in late Leeds screenwriter Kay Mellor’s comedy drama Playing the Field from 1998.

Stephenson says that Mellor was “somebody who really understood humanity and the human psyche. And so we were all just in awe of her on Playing the Field. Of course, she had just done Band of Gold and I'd been at drama school while I was watching that, and I'd really, really wanted to be in something that she’d done. So when it came up, it was incredible, but I think I wasn't the only one that felt like that. We all knew how lucky we were to work with somebody who could write the way that people spoke, who could write about people's inner feelings and get that across and evoke such empathy from the audience for ordinary everyday people.”

She has, of course, kept up with the impressions - her work includes co-starring with Jon Culshaw in BBC One’s The Impressions Show and voice work on the BritBox Spitting Image reboot - and those heading to see her in Yorkshire can expect plenty of range. The show will take audiences from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish, Shirley Bassey to Kate Bush, Celine Dion to Britney Spears, backed by pianist James Stead.

One of her best routines is Tina Turner, she says, and after the singer died last month, she has continued to perform it for audiences who give her the go-ahead – an example of how some impressions can be respectful and even poignant.

“It's not out of order if it's coming from an affectionate place, in public, with people who might be a fan,” she says.

She adds that the show is “almost a coming together of everything that I've done in terms of singing, impressions, and entertaining,” offering a “roller coaster - one impression after another, after another, and then and then a few songs in the voices.

“It's really joyful. I'm really enjoying it because audiences are enjoying it,” she adds, saying the long journeys are worth it to “entertain people and to feel that energy from them, that they've laughed and they've had a bloody brilliant time and then they've gone away with smiles on their faces, is really magical.”

Tickets for The Many Voices of Debra Stephenson are available at www.socomedy.co.uk