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Humans, a sci-fi show exploring artificial intelligences and how we could live alongside life-like robots, begins tonight – and features a bevvy of former Doctor Who stars, mainly from the Tenth Doctor era!
The series is set on a parallel Earth where the human race have servants called Synths – robots that have a startling similarity to us. The main Synth, Anita, occasionally does something that’s just “too human” – and is played by Gemma Chan, who you might know as Soo Lin from the Sherlock episode, The Blind Banker, but also appeared as Mia in 2009’s The Waters of Mars.
Joining her is Tom Goodman-Hill, whose credits include Spy, The Imitation Game, and The Office, as well as playing Reverend Golightly in 2008’s The Unicorn and the Wasp; Danny Webb (from The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit); Colin Morgan, aka Jethro from Midnight, but is better known as the titular character in Merlin; Ruth Bradley (Big Finish companion, Molly O’Sullivan); and Manpreet Bachu, who warned everyone not to click on a weird wi-fi symbol at the start of 2013’s The Bells of Saint John.
And then there’s Rebecca Front: it was recently announced that she’ll act opposite her The Thick of It star, Peter Capaldi, in the ninth series of Doctor Who!
Further familiar faces from Sherlock include Jonathan Aris (Anderson), and Katherine Parkinson (Kitty Riley).
The threat of AI is an interesting one, providing a seemingly-endless amount of inspiration. Right now, we have Avengers: Age of Ultron earning big bucks at the box office, but there’s also a wealth of literature, notably Isaac Asimov’s Robot series. Doctor Who‘s been chronicling the rise of the machine too; a personal favourite is WOTAN in The War Machines, but there’s also BOSS in The Green Death, Mr Smith in The Sarah Jane Adventures, the Half-Face Man in Deep Breath, and The Robots of Death.
Oh, and who can forget K9!
Written by Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent (the pair who worked on the last few series of Spooks, and wrote the film, Spooks: The Greater Good), Humans start tonight at 9pm on Channel 4, and airs in the US on AMC on 28th June.
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