BBC One’s new comedy finds warmth, loneliness and an uncomfortable glimpse of the future in an unlikely friendship between Sue Johnston and Diane Morgan.
A VERY BRITISH VISION OF THE AI FUTURE
Science fiction has spent decades warning us that artificial intelligence will eventually turn against humanity, with machines becoming conscious, seizing control and treating their creators as an irritating software bug requiring deletion. Ann Droid takes a rather more British approach. Instead of killer robots marching through ruined cities, we get an elderly widow, a slightly malfunctioning second-hand android and the deeply awkward question of who is going to look after us when we become old.
The BBC comedy stars Sue Johnston as Sue, a recently widowed woman determined to maintain her independence, and Diane Morgan as Linda, an AnnDroid Z58/100 Basic Eldercare Robot brought into her home to provide companionship, assistance and health monitoring. The six-part series was written by Morgan alongside Australian comedian Sarah Kendall and, although the premise sounds like the foundation for broad comedy, Ann Droid gradually reveals itself as something rather more thoughtful.
SUE JOHNSTON GIVES THE STORY ITS HEART
Sue Johnston has spent much of her career portraying women whose strength hides considerable vulnerability, from Brookside to The Royle Family, and she brings precisely that quality to Ann Droid. Her character has lost her husband and is confronting that peculiar moment in later life when independence can slowly begin to be negotiated away by well-meaning relatives. Her son Michael, played by Paul Ready, responds to his concerns about her welfare by purchasing Linda, but Sue’s initial reaction is hardly one of gratitude.
Linda is intrusive, literal-minded and socially hopeless. She monitors Sue when Sue would rather be left alone and interprets instructions with the sort of precision that demonstrates why computers and human beings remain very different creatures. Yet beneath the jokes sits something quietly painful, because Sue does not particularly need somebody to organise her life as much as she needs somebody to share it with. That distinction gradually becomes one of the most important ideas in the programme.
DIANE MORGAN BECOMES THE MACHINE
Diane Morgan is ideally suited to playing an android. Her familiar deadpan delivery, perfected through characters including Philomena Cunk and Mandy, suddenly acquires a completely different purpose as Linda speaks with mechanical certainty while frequently misunderstanding the emotional chaos unfolding around her. Morgan reportedly worked carefully on the physicality of the character, restricting movements and even avoiding blinking wherever possible, producing something deliberately uncanny without turning Linda into a conventional science-fiction robot.
Linda is not sinister; she is simply programmed, and that produces one of the programme’s cleverest ideas. While the humans around her become irritated, frightened, selfish, lonely, grieving and occasionally ridiculous, Linda approaches their problems with absolute logic. Eventually the supposedly emotionless machine begins exposing just how irrational the people around her actually are.
WHO IS REALLY CARING FOR WHOM?
This is where Ann Droid becomes considerably more interesting than its sitcom premise initially suggests. Britain is already wrestling with an ageing population, shortages within social care and the difficult question of how technology might help people remain independent for longer. Robot carers are therefore no longer quite the distant fantasy they once appeared to be, and developments involving robotic assistance in countries such as Japan have helped move the idea from speculative fiction towards a genuine discussion about the future of care.
Ann Droid does not simply declare that robots are wonderful, nor does it present artificial intelligence as an approaching catastrophe. Instead it asks a much better question: what happens when technology begins providing something that people have gradually stopped providing each other? Linda can monitor someone’s health, remember appointments, remain present and never become bored or impatient. She does not suddenly decide that she has somewhere more important to be. Yet companionship is supposed to require something more than processing power, and the uncomfortable possibility running underneath the comedy is that loneliness may not always care where companionship comes from.
A COMEDY ABOUT GRIEF AS MUCH AS TECHNOLOGY
There is another reason the programme works so well. Strip away the robotics and Ann Droid is really a story about bereavement. Sue is trying to understand what remains of her life after the person with whom she shared it has disappeared, giving Johnston some of the programme’s most affecting moments. Her performance never requires grand speeches about ageing because small expressions, pauses and moments of frustration frequently tell us considerably more.
Linda, meanwhile, is trying to understand a phenomenon no computer can neatly resolve. Why do humans continue loving somebody who is no longer there? Why do objects become precious because another person once touched them, and why can a memory produce happiness and sadness at precisely the same time? Questions such as these quietly transform Linda from a comic device into something approaching a genuine character. The irony is delicious: the android spends much of the programme learning about humanity while the audience is reminded how easily human beings themselves can neglect it.
THE SUPPORTING WORLD
Paul Ready provides much of the domestic tension as Sue’s son Michael, whose concern for his mother is genuine even when his attempts to manage her life become exasperating. Kathryn Hunter also appears as Sue’s wonderfully forthright friend Eileen, helping prevent the programme from becoming excessively sentimental. Together, the characters surrounding Sue demonstrate different attitudes towards ageing, responsibility and independence, allowing Ann Droid to examine elderly care without ever becoming a lecture.
The world of the programme is also deliberately familiar. There are no flying cars hovering outside the window, no glittering futuristic cities and very little of the visual machinery traditionally associated with science fiction. The technology has arrived, but Britain otherwise remains recognisably British. That may be one of the programme’s most believable jokes about the future: artificial intelligence may revolutionise society, but somehow the wallpaper will probably remain exactly the same.
A WARM RESPONSE
Critical reaction to Ann Droid has been notably positive, with reviewers repeatedly praising the combination of humour and melancholy and singling out Johnston’s performance and Morgan’s restrained portrayal of Linda. The programme appears to have connected with viewers precisely because it does not treat artificial intelligence as a technological spectacle. Instead, it brings the subject into the living room and asks what AI might mean in the most ordinary and intimate parts of human existence.
That timing is particularly important. Artificial intelligence has stopped being something confined to science-fiction films and research laboratories and has begun appearing in people’s everyday lives through computers, phones, personal assistants and increasingly sophisticated conversational systems. Ann Droid takes that development one stage further and imagines what happens when the machine is not simply answering questions but physically sharing someone’s home and becoming part of their daily routine.
THE MACHINE IN THE LIVING ROOM
There are bigger and louder television dramas about artificial intelligence, but Ann Droid may ultimately prove more perceptive than many of them because its central question is not whether machines will eventually become human. Instead, it asks whether human beings will increasingly ask machines to perform roles that were once fulfilled by families, neighbours and communities.
That question becomes particularly powerful when applied to elderly care. If Linda can make Sue feel safer, less isolated and more independent, does it matter that Linda’s apparent affection began as computer code? If a machine consistently demonstrates patience and companionship while the human beings around it are permanently too busy, where exactly should we draw the line between artificial care and genuine care?
Ann Droid never needs to answer those questions completely. It simply places a robot beside an elderly woman and watches something unexpected develop between them. For a programme built around artificial intelligence, its greatest achievement is that it turns out to be profoundly interested in something much older: human loneliness, bereavement and the extraordinary difference made when somebody, or perhaps one day something, simply remains beside us.
