Come on, Apple, give us a phone that can empty the dishwasher
For 95 years, since the Czech writer Karel Capek first coined the word, we have been warned about robots — how they will become smarter than us, look and behave exactly like us . . . and then take over the world.
Great sci-fi authors such as Isaac Asimov have wrestled with the conundrum of preventing robotic slave labour from slaughtering us all. The psychedelic genius Philip K. Dick wrote dozens of paranoid stories about robots among us, with hallucinatory titles such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — later to become t he 1982 film Blade runner, starring Harrison Ford.
We can’t say we haven’t been warned. But admit it: you’d sell the car and pawn your grandad’s watch to buy a real robot. Your own Star Wars- s ty l e C- 3 Po humanoid wouldn’t just do the cleaning and cook the dinner. It would be the ultimate status symbol.
People fork out a fortune for their phones, to ensure they have the latest upgrade of the most fashionable brand — and a phone can’t even load the dishwasher.
The sci-fi rule is that no good can come of creating realistic humanoid machines. But when harassed dad Tom Goodman-Hill dashed down to the appliances store at the beginning of Humans (C4) to buy a housework robot, all I could think was: ‘Whatever took you so long, Tom?’
How is a stay-at-home father expected to cope with three kids and no robot? Generations of sci-fi movies, from Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis to Will Smith in 2004’s I robot, have foreseen a future filled with androids. The clever twist with Humans is to set it in the present day.
The plot was no different from stories in any number of Fifties magazines with l urid covers and names l i ke Astounding or Weird Tales.
While members of a suburban family were getting used to their electronic domestic servant, Anita (played by Gemma Chan), a band of escaped robots had gone feral and were living in the alleys, dodging the android hunters.
That’s such a staple concept of science fiction, it’s almost a folk tale for the digital age. But a story doesn’t have to be original, so long as i t’s well told, and Humans combined a witty script with a superb cast.
Katherine Parkinson, who won a Bafta for The IT Crowd, is a motherof-three in Humans, with a brood straight from the Box of Typical TV Children: a moody teenage daughter, a hormonal boy and a cute but spoilt little girl.
Colin Morgan plays the leader of the robot rebels. His career has stuttered since he was the boy wizard in Merlin but it’s good to see him back on TV. American star William Hurt appeared in an enigmatic subplot, and we even saw rebecca Front for a splitsecond, as a scary nurse robot.
Humans has the potential to become a major serial with multiple story strands. And if it inspires tech firms such as Apple and Google to stop mucking about with telephones, and invent a proper robot, so much the better. Jonathan Di mbleby was contending with a tangle of storylines too, in The BBC At War ( BBC2), as he attempted to explain how Broadcasting House had maintained its impartiality as it reported on unfolding events during World War II.
Looking more rumpled than his raincoat, Jonathan mooched around old battlefields, exploring the underground bunkers on the Maginot Line and exchang- ing long faces with camels in Libya.
This two-part documentary is intended, with the BBC hoping to renew its royal Charter next year, to underscore the importance of the institution to the British way of life. But Jonathan admitted that Churchill always regarded Auntie Beeb as ‘the enemy within the gates’.
National security clearly came a poor second to the BBC’s own sense of prestige.
Jonathan was c hosen as presenter because his father, richard, was one of the Corporation’s leading war reporters. But he wasted this personal connection by pompously referring to his dad as ‘Dimbleby’.
The show might have been better handled by a robot.