ANN DROID (BBC1, Friday, 6.30pm and iPlayer) centres on Sue (Sue Johnston), a grieving widow, and Linda (Diane Morgan), her outdated care robot, who means well but gets everything wrong!
Linda said: “It’s set three years in the future where robots have been rolled out to care for the elderly, when their children aren’t around to look after them. I play Linda, an Ann Droid robot, who is reconditioned, and strikes up an unlikely friendship with widower Sue.”
She continued: “I read a story in the paper which said that apparently they were rolling them [robots] out in Japan and I told Pippa my producer and we started laughing about it. It was also inspired by the time in lockdown when I decided to send my mum a tablet so she could do online shopping – she reacted like I’d sent her a nail bomb!”
For all its silliness, the show does have a more poignant side to it.
“That sort of accidentally happened. The more we wrote the story and realised it was about grief and looking after elderly parents it started to become more poignant,” added Diane. “And then when Sue was doing it, it started to have heart, which was incredible because that’s not what we set out to do. We thought it would just be a silly comedy about a slightly rubbish robot.”
Sue, for her part, said she couldn’t resist the chance of working with Diane.
“I wanted to be part of it because Diane wrote it and I’m such a fan and a friend of hers, so when she sent me the script, it was just joyful and I thought ‘Yes, thank you very much, I’ll have that!’, said Sue.
“It’s wonderful and I just love all the characters, they are all well written and they’re all people you know, and find along the way, so it’s just really funny. There’s also a lot of love in it, there’s such a warmth and friendship about it all, and that comes from Diane’s writing, which says a lot about how she is as a human being. It’s a very special script.”
And what are her own feelings about AI and the role it has in society?
“It scares me, I’m old and technology baffles me, “ laughed Sue. “Even as it stands, it baffles me, so with AI I think you can’t close your mind to it, because it can do some brilliant things like detecting illness but then you see the danger of it when you see people being identified and recreated by it and putting words into their mouths that shouldn’t be there. The danger of it all worries me.”
With the big terrestrial TV channels gearing up for a busy autumn, luckily there’s plenty of great show to watch on the streaming channels which brings us nicely to LUCKY (AppleTV) – a seven part thriller about a young grifter who finds herself on the wrong side of vicious mobsters.
Lucky is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, 29, who has become one of our brightest young talents after her breakthrough role in Netflix’s massive hit “The Queen’s Gambit” – and follow up hits in “Peaky Blinders” and George Miller’s crazy, all-action blockbuster “Mad Max – Furiosa.’’
She told The Hollywood Reporter: “This somebody who can’t sit still. And I’m somebody who loves to move.”
With a strong supporting cast of Annette Bening, Timothy Oliphant and William Fichtner, “Lucky” is well worth checking out whilst waiting for the start of the new Premiership season!
Well that’s it for now – catch you next week for some more TV chatter – stay safe y’all!
Author: Steve
Editor of Hartlepool Life and author of TV Life