15 July 2026

Diane Morgan’s very human robot

Ann Droid is sadder and sweeter than the comedian’s famous work

Photo by BBC/Boffola Pictures/Olly Courtney

It’s as if all our social anxieties have arrived at once: failsons, artificial intelligence and social care. Sue is 80, and starting to feel it, beginning not just to fall but to “have” falls, falls that she resolutely explains away as “faints” or “trips”. She’s a widow, and lives alone in her two-up, two-down, though she’s recently been joined by her only son, Michael. He’s a very 21st-century kind of pathetic: 42, still wears beanies, and works part-time in a guitar shop, while earning money on the side volunteering for clinical trials. He’s only back home at all because his wife, Renée, cheated on him with her jiu-jitsu instructor. But now Michael’s getting back together with her and, disappointed that her husband still lives at home with his mother, Renée calls him a “nappy-wearing, breast-fed, emperor baby”. Keen to start his adult life for good, and wary of leaving his mum to live alone, Michael buys her a robot carer.

The second-hand “Ann Droid” – played by an even more dead-eyed than usual Diane Morgan (best known for her satirical TV-presenter character Philomena Cunk), who also co-wrote the series – is framed as a cost-saving. When Sue suggests hiring a human carer, Michael replies, “A human? They cost a fortune!” And I like the humdrum way robots are handled in this near-future, which I sense is exactly how the revolution will be when it comes. Several of Sue’s neighbours have similar machines, and this is apparently a world used to driverless cars. But the “Ann Droids” are still delivered by some brusque, baseball-capped driver, and life is still as dreary and overcast as England will surely be, whatever the post-singularity looks like. Life goes on, pretty much as it always has, only with waxy retainers tailing their owners, and asking questions like, “Would you like to talk? Talking improves mental health!”

But if you are expecting a dystopic satire on the convulsions to come, you will be disappointed – this series is something odder, sadder and sweeter than that. Sue can’t stand the robot at first – she names it Linda, after a sister she hated. She’s determined to send it back, insistent that she can cope alone. But we gradually learn it’s not independence she craves, but a different and specific kind of company.

She had expected to grow old with Dave, her husband and first love. “I don’t know how… I’m going to do this last bit… alone,” she says to Linda, through tears (and Sue Johnston’s performance as the character that shares her name is a quiet triumph: lined, haunted and distantly beautiful). It is only when Sue sees that Linda has planted the “David’s Rose” that she was struggling with in the front garden that she decides to let her android stay.

The series follows in a surprisingly episodic way from here, with Sue and Linda as its odd couple, getting into scrapes and getting out of them again, and it takes Johnston’s little looks of buried memory to keep those rawer feelings swirling beneath the surface.

The writing does slip in to rare moments of anguish – during a visit to a care home for a fading friend’s birthday, her android retinue stand around her slumped armchair, singing robotically along. And the less said about the subplots involving Michael the better. He’s such a born loser – pitching up to jiu-jitsu to be humiliated by the towering, cuckolding coach, and then using Linda to help him write songs for an open-mic night at which he miserably fails – that he is difficult to root for. Renée is equally unappealing (“If anything, my affair was the best thing I did for us,” she tells Michael during a marital scuffle), and given the delicacy of the central narrative their subplot feels undeveloped and rather cruel.

But otherwise this is a warm and feeling comedy, its light only occasionally dappled by shade. Linda has a neighbourhood of friends, who meet and chat at the local charity shop, and in one episode they all travel to the seaside, to scatter the ashes of a friend. Mostly we’re in a world of easy humour: a running joke sees Linda quoting catchphrases from The Apprentice, which she watched with Sue and uses as an analogue for real life. If Diane Morgan has produced something without the bite of Philomena Cunk series, Ann Droid has humbler virtues, and is no worse for them.