Whether they’re plated in silver and gold or as humanoid-looking as the rest of us, Rory Doherty has a soft spot for British robots, celebrating the very best onscreen.
Brian and Charles
Cold and discerning, bumbling and catty, blunt and unemotional; a lot of descriptors for British people can easily apply to robots. The depiction of sentient machinery on screen has a long history of casting Brits to bring artificial intelligence to life, and with the release of Brian and Charles, the tradition continues in fresh, silly ways.
For decades, the well-spoken Brit has filled movie screens, with Hollywood transplanting varying British stereotypes, both prissy and duplicitous, and giving them innards of pipes and tubes, sometimes even a hard metal shell. Such a tradition has given modern film and TV ample opportunity to respond to iconic characters, putting fun spins on artificial intelligence even from British entertainment itself. Now matter how widely-loved or niche, the Ro-Brit isn’t going anywhere fast.
C-3PO from Star Wars
From the gallery of droids across every Star Wars instalment, none are more loved than dynamic duo C-3P0 and R2-D2. While both played by Brits—Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker—Daniels brings a masterclass in physical presence and clipped, anxious tone that puts him in the history books.
His little scurrying steps and delicate movements make him completely hopeless in any dangerous situation—a dissatisfaction he makes sure to vocalise as often as possible—and you get the feeling he would love nothing more than putting his feet up and having a cuppa after every exhausting adventure.
Ash from Alien
The reveal that Ash is an android, played by none other than Ian Holm—Bilbo Baggins himself—comes after a pretty gruesome murder attempt when the remaining Nostromo crewmembers are already neck-deep with an impending extra-terrestrial infestation.
A secret agent from the Weyland corporation, his outing as an artificial being hammers home how expendable and isolated the human characters are, with those they took for granted as being on their side in a fight for survival not even being their own kind. Ash is fantastic representation for robots filled with milk, which spurts pretty furiously over all surfaces as his surviving team tried to beat the android into malfunction. It’s the second scariest we’ve ever seen Ian Holm.
Vision from the Marvel cinematic universe
Previously appearing only as Paul Bettany’s voice in Iron Man’s helmet, the AI system Jarvis was downloaded into a synthozoid body in Age of Ultron, which conveniently looked exactly like Paul Bettany. After he rushed through some existential musings, the newly birthed Vision got down to the fun stuff—phasing through walls and shooting lasers out of his crown (not to mention picking up Thor’s hammer!).
Later instalments gave Bettany a lot more room to breathe with the character, and his shining moment came after an unpleasant encounter with Thanos, where he co-led the reality-warping sitcom WandaVision. Watching him fumble through various kitsch settings, as well as debate the nature of his existence with himself puts him comfortably in the canon of excellent British bots.
Anne Droid from Doctor Who
It’s hundreds of thousands of years in the future, and light entertainment is still going strong. Specifically, the series one finale of the newly revived Doctor Who posited that of all vestiges of contemporary society to survive, none would be more popular than The Weakest Link, the intense, cut-throat quiz show where host Anne Robinson would insult you as you voted which of your team members was the worst at general knowledge. Its legacy lives on here in a robotic version of Robinson, whose acidic demeanour is made all the worse due to the laser in her mouth that vaporises the losers. Maybe you had to be in 2005 to get the joke.
Charles from Brian and Charles
Every Pinocchio or Frankenstein’s monster is defined by the intentions of their inventor more than anything else. They’re the ones who guide their creation through the world, imprinting their own fears and beliefs onto the constructed life and codifying how it lives and breathes. While it grapples with such issues in a somewhat quirkier tone, Brian and Charles is no exception to this rule.
A lonesome tinkerer in a rural Welsh cottage, Brian sets out to achieve his ever-elusive dream of actually inventing something that works. Miraculously, his plan to construct a walking, talking robotic humanoid does just that, and with a rubber head and washing-machine body, Charles is revealed in all its glory. Inside the lumbering frame is comedian Chris Hayward, and with the vocal quality of text-to-speech software, Brian’s physicality and delivery makes him constantly engaging, and the most authentically rural robot Britain has ever produced.
