TV Review: HOW TO BUILD A ROBOT + EMPLOYABLE ME

This article was originally published in The Courier on 2nd December 2017.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

HOW TO BUILD A ROBOT: Wednesday, Channel 4

EMPLOYABLE ME: Monday, BBC Two

One of the most disappointing aspects of modern life is the continuing absence of lifelike robots. It's 2017, shouldn't we have caught up with science-fiction by now?

Robots do exist, of course. They’ve become increasingly useful in the worlds of surgery, manufacturing and agriculture. But whenever they’re designed to resemble humans, they always fall prey to the notorious uncanny valley effect. That is, they look blankly unnerving and sinister. They freak us out (dude).

Not only that, we just don’t trust these sophisticated vessels of artificial intelligence, especially now that they’ve started taking our jobs. UKIP must detest them.

In HOW TO BUILD A ROBOT, inventor and puppeteer David McGoran embarked upon a mission to conquer these suspicions. He believes, quite rightly, that humans won’t fully embrace robots until they move and react just like us. He also believes he’s on the verge of creating that very thing: a robot we can relate to on an emotional level.

McGoran recently assembled a bohemian cabal of dancers, artists and engineers to help him create a robot that the general public can fall in love with. A sensitive soul with a poetic turn of phrase, he realised that human beings tend to respond positively to cute, malleable creatures. That’s why very few of us form meaningful relationships with kitchen appliances.

Following a series of false starts and crude prototypes, the team eventually designed a cuddly little Teletubby capable of interacting with people under its own painstakingly pre-programmed steam. This real-life Pixar character was then left on the streets of Bristol to discover the complexities of human intimacy. The results were heart-warming.

People actually responded to him, they picked him up and revealed simple truths about themselves. The experiment succeeded on both a technical and – yes – spiritual level.

By creating a tactile robot capable of relatively realistic interaction, McGoran may have disproved the notion that every human being is unique. After all, aren’t we all pre-programmed to carry out basic physical and emotional functions? The vast majority of us navigate our way through society in essentially the same way.

That may sound like a cold, cynical conclusion, but McGoran’s findings were actually quite uplifting. Autonomous robots could remind us that, despite our apparent differences, we’re all equal. We all belong to the same species. We’re all human.

David Tennant narrated this quietly profound documentary with exactly the same wryly emphatic inflections he used in Twenty Twelve and W1A, thus making it feel like a spoof at times. Thankfully, much like McGoran’s friendly robot, it was real.

My fluctuating faith in human nature was further restored by EMPLOYABLE ME, the valuable documentary series in which disabled job-seekers challenge the notion that employers welcome them without discrimination.

The latest series introduced us to Ryan and Andy. Ryan has a severe case of Tourette’s Syndrome. Until his stroke, Andy was the director of a massively successful business. They’d both suffered through hundreds of failed job applications.

Assisted by a specialist job-seeking project overseen by a psychologist, Ryan and Andy eventually found gainful employment. Ryan, a fish fanatic, was hired by an aquarium centre, while Andy was employed as a motivational speaker.

Without a trace of condescending sentiment, Employable Me empowers disabled people while combating casual prejudice.

Television, folks, it can sometimes be a force for good.

TV Review: DARK ANGEL & HUMANS

This article was originally published in The Dundee Courier on 5 November 2016.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

Dark Angel: Monday, STV

Humans: Sunday, Channel 4

ITV has dramatised so many real-life crime and murder cases over the years, it’s all but exhausted the 20^th century as a gruesome source of inspiration.

Hence, one presumes, the arrival of two-part death carnival Dark Angel, starring Joanne Froggatt (dutiful housemaid Anna from Downton Abbey) as 19^th century serial murderer Mary Ann Cotton. This is truly horrible history.

From 1865 to 1872, Cotton cut a poisonous swathe through the North East of England, murdering several husbands – and possibly eleven of her 13 children – for their life insurance policies.

In the hands of writer Gwyneth Hughes, she was initially portrayed as a sympathetic figure mired in poverty and struggling to raise a family while her first husband scraped a paltry living at sea.

But our sympathies soon waned when she discovered the swift and painful properties of arsenic.

A fine, intelligent actress, Froggatt pitched her performance astutely. The – to say the least – morally wayward nature of her character was rendered more chilling by her decision to adopt the gentle North East tones of Sarah Millican.

Froggat’s Cotton wasn’t depicted as a leering maniac, but rather as a coldly pragmatic, manipulative killer who wasn’t beyond feeling guilt for her actions. However, those occasional pangs of conscience couldn’t dissuade her from a cruel and perverse mission to climb the social ladder.

No one suspected foul play when her family members coincidentally died in vomit and faeces-stained agony, because Victorian society couldn’t even begin to entertain the notion that a woman would be capable of such crimes.

By the end of episode one, she’d dispatched two hapless husbands, two children and her own mother. No wonder the blue-grey colour palette looked so depressed.

It may not be the most compelling study of a psychopath you’ll ever see, but Dark Angel is a suitably bleak and low-key account of an overlooked chapter in British criminal history. Seldom have the words “Let’s make you a nice cup of tea” been delivered with such an impending sense of doom.

A deserved hit for Channel 4, series one of Humans was one of the most thoughtful and intelligently-realised sci-fi dramas of recent years.

Based in a near-future Britain where lifelike androids – or synths – are employed as unquestioning slaves within the service industries, it managed to combine all the usual philosophical quandaries of A.I. fiction with an overarching conspiracy narrative and an effective domestic setting.

But where to go from there? In attempting to broaden the scope of this world, the first episode of series two was a globe-trotting muddle in which far too many strands competed for our attention.

The relatively small-scale drama of series one has been replaced by an overly busy stew of disjointed ideas. It’ll hopefully settle down and regain focus soon, but this was a textbook example of how not to begin a new series.

Or perhaps it’s because I’m beginning to suspect that I don’t particularly care about the fate of our rag-tag group of sentient synths and their voyage of self-discovery, and preferred Humans when it was the story of a dysfunctional family struggling to cope with the introduction of a synth into their lives. The scenes involving the Hawkins’ were more engaging than anything else in episode one.

I’ll gladly eat those words if Humans 2 matches the quality of its predecessor. Maybe, in its eagerness to grab our attention, it just got off to an awkward, malfunctioning start. 

TV Review: HUMANS and PRIZED APART

Humans: Sunday, Channel 4

Prized Apart: Saturday, BBC One

Paul Whitelaw

Set in a parallel present where lifelike synthetic humans are as commonplace as iPads, sci-fi drama Humans takes the bold – some might say foolhardy - step of exploring territory that many great writers have traversed before.

Yet while the questions it poses are familiar – is artificial intelligence capable of feeling? Do we have the right to create it? Are we in danger of being usurped by the technology we're increasingly reliant upon? - it handles them with care and, in terms of world-building, precise attention to detail. 

And while it's too early to say if Humans will add up to much, at least its influences are openly acknowledged in a rather playful way.

It began with a harassed husband and father purchasing an android servant – known colloquially as synths – to help around the home. His wife, Laura, is a busy lawyer beset with mid-life malaise (none of the humans in Humans are happy). She's grown distant from her family, a problem compounded – despite her husband's contrary intentions – by the arrival of Anita, a strikingly beautiful synth whose eerily perfect countenance sets Laura on edge.

A sly wrinkle on the notion of a spouse feeling threatened by a partner's interest in a younger model – a theme echoed by the sub-plot involving a detective and the hunky synth who cares for his sick wife - this dysfunctional domestic setting is a master-stroke. It grounds an essentially fantastical premise in plausible reality. Though we automatically feel sympathy for Anita – after all, she's only following pre-programmed orders – we regard her with suspicion when viewed through Laura's eyes.

Sure enough, Laura has reason to be paranoid. It gradually transpires that Anita belongs to a rogue group of synths who have somehow developed independent thoughts and feelings. She's merely pretending to be subservient. But why?

Meanwhile, her fellow sentient synths are on the run from scientists fearful of their advanced state. This conspiracy thriller element coexists smoothly with the claustrophobic unease of the suburbanite scenes and an intriguing strand involving a widowed scientist (William Hurt) and his malfunctioning synth/surrogate son.

A droll sense of humour also ensures that Humans never feels pompous, even when confronting its hefty moral quandaries head-on. With its chilly aesthetic and dry spurts of satire, it occasionally resembles one of the better Black Mirror episodes. I particularly like the way our world, with no cosmetic alterations at all, is depicted as a bland, cold, chrome and glass wasteland.

But Humans wouldn't work if it was wholly cynical. It succeeds in asking us to sympathise with Laura and invest in Hurt's Geppetto/Pinocchio plight. Plus the horrifying pathos of robots cursed with living souls haunts the show throughout; the scenes depicting a sentient synth sold into prostitution make their point with unsparing yet compassionate intensity.

Regardless of noble intentions, the whole enterprise would capsize completely were it not for an utterly convincing performance from Gemma Chan as Anita. Mercifully free of the body-popping tics which often blight actors playing robots, her subtly precise, blandly benign demeanour is unsettling and – given what we know of her true nature – ineffably sad.

By sheer coincidence, Prized Apart marks the first instance of a quiz show devised and fronted by robots. A conceptually flawed bore, it sends members of the public on a Moroccan quest to win £100,000 via harness-enhanced stunts. Meanwhile, their loved ones back home in the studio provide half-hearted commentary in a sterile hangar commandeered by chief Auton Emma Watson.

None of it makes sense. The location segments don't gel with the stilted studio diversions – they're clearly not happening simultaneously - and there's never any sense of genuine peril, triumph or momentum. Imagine I'm A Celebrity... without the celebrities. Or Bake Off without the baking. Or life without meaning. That still doesn't come close to the echoing pointlessness of Prized Apart.