This feature was published in The Telegraph in May 2018

The third series of artificial intelligence drama Humans, premiering tonight on Channel 4, opens with some breaking news.

‘We’re getting multiple reports of a worldwide malfunction affecting synthetics’, announces ITV anchor Alastair Stewart, referring to a world of subservient robots who have suddenly gained sentience. ‘Not obeying commands’, continues BBC News’ Simon McCoy. ‘This apparently emotional behaviour is unprecedented and highly unpredictable.’ Footage of traffic accidents. A plane falls out of the sky. Riots in the streets. ’The worldwide death toll for those lost in the chaos of the mass synth malfunction is now thought to be in the tens of thousands.’

“I have to say,” says Simon McCoy, now chuckling down the telephone, “any TV or film script I’ve done in the past, however ridiculous it may seem at the time, six months or a year later – my god, fact is emulating fiction! I very rarely look at something now and say ‘Well, that’s very unlikely’.”

Much like Alastair Stewart, Huw Edwards, George Aligiah or many of the other newsreaders who feature in Humans, filming fictional news reports – the good kind of fake news – has become a strange, if relatively minor part of the job for McCoy. He has reported on two wanted men in BBC drama Happy Valley. He has broken the news of an MI5 embarrassment in 2015 film Spooks: The Greater Good. Both, according to McCoy, are examples of requests that have only grown more frequent over the last ten years – the newsreader as actor, as an anchor to the real world, as a vehicle to keep a plot moving.

Not that McCoy, famed for his withering royal baby coverage, and an on-air incident in 2013 in which he mistook a pack of A4 printing paper for an iPad, sees himself winning an Oscar any time soon.

“I’d love to say that we have a week in rehearsal and time in make-up and a couple of weeks in Spain to get ready for it but no,” he says. “We’re asked if we’re around to do it and then it’s just about getting hold of a studio and having the script put in front of us. We are asked to tweak it. For example, they might send through ‘the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office’ but we’re a British broadcaster so we would just say ‘the Foreign Office’. Clunky language is what we spend our whole day trying to get rid of. The point is we must not look like actors. We must look like the newsreaders we’re supposed to be. It’s weird.

“The most frightening option is they say ‘we’ve got a set ready, can you be in east London at four o’clock?’ and you arrive and there’s a trailer with your name on it. And suddenly you feel like an actor and that’s the only time it’s all gone horribly wrong. I was filming for The Gunman, which was a Sean Penn film [released in 2015], and they had set up this little TV news studio set and suddenly they’re going, ‘right, we’re recording in 30…’ and the whole set stops and goes quiet and everybody is just looking at you. I try to speak… I felt a trickle of sweat down my forehead. I think it probably took about 18 takes – and they wouldn’t have had a good one at the end of it. That was the most terrifying one I’ve ever done and I don’t think anyone involved will ever forgive me.”

For producers, and the news channels they work with, the process of arranging a fictional news report is slightly more complicated. In the case of Humans, for instance, producer Vicki Delow had to go through two stages of approval. The first, as she explains, was “to contact various news channels and see if they would be prepared to take part. We had to show them the script and give them the context in which their news readers would be appearing… With the era of ‘fake news’ there is an understandable nervousness with some news broadcasters about showing their readers reporting news stories that aren’t real.”

For both the BBC and ITN, this stage of the approval process centres around what is considered appropriate for their brand to be associated with.

“About ten years ago there was less willingness for the BBC to have its news brand used in fictional circumstances,” explains Martin Freeman, Rights Manager of BBC News. “But then they discovered that BBC drama programmes were then having Sky News branding on it because Sky were more open to this conversation. Which we deemed to be ridiculous. These were BBC dramas, why wouldn’t they have BBC branding in it? So we moved positions and we’re a little bit more open to a conversation now.

“Sometimes drams just want to use a BBC mic in a press conference scene. Or if they’re more elaborate, like Humans, they have a script. That script then goes to either the controller of news programming or the editor of the strand they’re trying to recreate and a decision is made. Some do get declined as they’re either ridiculous or we wouldn’t be associated with it… We recently turned down a [forthcoming Mila Kunis comedy] called The Spy Who Dumped Me. Comedies can cause concerns for us. Not because we don’t have a sense of humour, but because our news brand has a certain gravitas, and they were going to use our brand in connection to a slightly sexualised report we would never do. It has to reflect how we would report this if it was real, even if it is fictional.”

After the request is approved, and fees are paid for licensing, studio time and the news reader’s time, the second stage of the process is making the report itself – branding, headline, ticker, graphics and all.

“Each broadcaster has a different way of doing it,” says Delow. “With ITN we sent them the words we wanted on the strap and they sent back the straps for us to comp onto our picture. With the BBC and [American cable news channel] Spectrum they sent us the graphics as a kit of parts and we put them together ourselves before showing them what we’d done… Then, when everything was put together, we’d send the final sequence for approval and licensing.”

As far as the BBC is concerned (ITN declined an interview request), there are strict rules for how the reports themselves are eventually framed on television – especially during a time when it’s getting harder and harder to separate fact from fiction.

“We try to give advice like ‘don’t show a newsreader with our graphics in full frame,” says Freeman. “It has to be slightly off so you can see a character watching a television or something like that. This is so if someone was flicking channels, they couldn’t flick channels and accidentally come across a fictional news report and potentially believe that it is real. It has to be slightly off so you can see it from some other perspective.”

There is the question, of course, of whether all this trouble is ultimately worth it – of whether the inclusion of real life newsreaders in dramas does more to bounce you out of a fictional world than ground you in it. For Delow however, there isn’t a doubt.

“I think it’s been hugely beneficial for us to use real life newsreaders. It’s definitely helped to ground the show in a recognisable, relatable world which is so important for a show like Humans where we are dealing with such big ideas. I think the risk of it bouncing you out of drama is negated by how you use this kind of story telling.

“We talked a lot as a group when we started [series three] about how we were going to bring the audience up to speed with where we were in the Humans world. It’s been a whole year since the end of series two and a lot has happened. It was really important to us that this first episode didn’t feel just like set up so we decided that a montage of news reports was the way to go. It’s really eye catching and pulls you into the drama and the world very quickly. Even though it was a massively complicated process I’m so pleased we did it. It was definitely the right choice.”

And finally… We now go over to Simon McCoy with the question: Would you rather read fictional news or news about the royal baby?

He thinks for a few seconds. “I’d put them in a similar category.”