‘Suddenly I was a celebrity. I didn’t want to be!’ Sue Johnston on fame, loneliness and her new robot pal
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- Sue Johnston, 82, stars as a recent widow named Sue in 'Ann Droid,' a new BBC sitcom co-created by Diane Morgan and Sarah Kendall, premiering 17 July at 9.30pm on BBC One
- Diane Morgan plays Linda, a dated humanoid robot who blasts Cotton Eye Joe at people in a bid to cheer them up and lacks the intelligence of newer models
- The show's premise is set a few years into the future where robots are decimating the job market — Johnston's on-screen son Michael (Paul Ready, Morgan's Motherland co-star) is eventually made redundant by a machine
- Morgan specifically named her character Sue after Johnston, having met her on set of Sky sitcom Rovers years ago; Morgan told the paper Johnston is 'a perfect human being' and echoes the late Caroline Aherne's northern, deadpan humor
- Johnston told the interviewer she feels '50/50' about AI and fears it 'could fall into the wrong hands because there's a lot of wrong hands around at the moment,' though she watched a video of robots running a marathon with 'more affection' than she would previously have managed
- Johnston, who had a fall last year and says she 'recognised the loneliness thing' in the script, has nothing else in her diary after wrapping series 3 of James Graham's Sherwood
- Johnston only became a household name at 38 in Brookside in 1982, having already spent 11 years in theatre and education — and once worked as Brian Epstein's 'assistant's assistant's assistant' at Liverpool's Cavern Club
Why it matters: An 82-year-old lead in a sitcom about AI replacing human workers is a pointed casting choice. Johnston herself is ambivalent, calling the technology '50/50' and warning it could fall into the 'wrong hands around at the moment,' so the production lands with its star openly ambivalent about the anxieties it dramatizes. With Sherwood's third series wrapped and no further work booked, the role also answers a worry she voiced in her 2011 memoir — that the phone might never ring again.
