This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Getting old is nothing new. Neither is turning the perils of senior citizenship into TV comedy. Last of the Summer Wine folk got enough laughs to last 295 episodes, while the two glorious bookends of the oeuvre remain The Golden Girls and One Foot in the Grave. Now, in BBC One’s Ann Droid, we have an exciting addition that is equally timeless yet also wonderfully topical.
Here, with familiar tinges of that wonderful sadcom Mum, Sue (Sue Johnston) is two years widowed, struggling to keep on keeping on and surrounded by a crop of strong characters. Her son Mike, bent double in submission to his cheating wife, is a role pre-cooked for Paul Ready straight from Motherland, while her “frenemy” Phyllis (Margot Leicester) is there to stick the knife in with a smile: “It’s terrific you’re trying to learn a skill.”
So far, so last-century sitcom. Then Mike decides what his mother needs is a robot carer, “someone to talk to or help with the shopping”. Cheaper than a human, on duty 24/7, just needs a wi-fi connection. Enter second-hand android Linda, an oversized Palitoy figure in a box – until she is switched on and Diane Morgan brings her thrillingly to dead-eyed life.
Unblinking and unforgivingly bob-wigged, Linda cuts a swathe through Sue’s community. She’s that friend – all literal, no filter, with dry-as-a-bone humour; accidental or intentional, we’re never quite sure, though I do know less expressive people. Culturally informed by watching The Apprentice, she makes a great joke about thanking Sue for the opportunity and claiming more sincerity than one of Lord Sugar’s candidates. I laughed out loud at the result of Mike’s request that she dig him out of a hole at a music night with an “original song”. Even funnier is her adherence to instructions on how to make new friends: smile and ask a question. Chaos ensues.
Sue Johnston and Diane Morgan star in Ann Droid. BBC / Boffola Pictures / Gary Moyes
The arrival of someone new navigating our world and becoming indispensable is nothing new. Luke Skywalker had R2-D2; Mindy had Mork; Buck Rogers had Twiki. Before Humans and the more recent Sunny joined the canon, Viz readers had the comic strip Robbie’s Robot Carer.
But bubbling away beneath the laughs in Ann Droid is something poignant and thought-provoking about the perils and vulnerability of enforced solitude. Sue, it turns out, needs Linda for more than just her ability to cook toad-in-the-hole.
Mourning the past, unable yet to enjoy “a future of wondrous things” as promised by a fortune-teller, Sue embodies our primordial instinct to connect with those around us. “Humans, we get attached to things,” she muses – ideally to other human beings but, as it turns out, not essentially so.
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We know this to be true. On page 10 of this issue, Matt Baker talks about how dogs became his closest companions during a confusing childhood. On screen, Steven Spielberg cracked open our hearts when Elliott agreed to help ET phone home. Who can forget the sacrifice made by personal computer Edgar at the end of Electric Dreams, or the existential loneliness of HAL in 2001: a Space Odyssey?
With a beautifully light touch, Linda brings something similar to Sue. Does it matter if your son forgets to plant the rose you’ve bought in memory of your late husband if, late at night, your cyborg instead gets its hands dirty with soil from the front garden? Sue speaks for all of us when she worries about her plight: “I don’t want to do this bit alone.”
She finds many consolations in the capers of this inspiring show, but the sweetest is the quietest: a robotic voice in her ear, reminding her, “You are not alone. You have me.”
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