Diane Morgan’s latest sitcom Ann Droid has been a huge hit for the BBC, thanks to its tender humour and spritely outlook on old age. More than four million of us watched the first episode and I greedily hoovered up the rest. But despite how much I love Morgan’s robot Linda, I’m desperately hoping that the writer will pull the plug on Ann Droid – not to put it out of its misery, but rather to preserve its perfection.
As anyone who watches television with any sort of regularity will attest, sitcoms are the hardest genre to get right. So many of them are clunky, or else too thinly spread, while some even dare commit the very worst crime available to comedy: not being funny at all (looking at you Ricky Gervais’s Alley Cats). But Ann Droid has proved a jewel in this particularly murky Nile.
The series is set in the very near future, where the ongoing loneliness and social isolation epidemic among elderly people is being increasingly dealt with by robots. What better option for the harried sandwich generation than to offload ageing and ailing parents onto AI-in-human-form, thereby freeing them up to focus on the carnage of their own advancing years?
Sue (Sue Johnston) has been a widow for two years, and has recently had a fall. Her hapless middle-aged son Michael (Paul Ready) is far too busy losing his job and questioning his sperm count to give her the attention she requires, and so he buys her an out-of-date, second-hand android device named Linda (Diane Morgan).
