Robot companion films are not a new idea — merely’barely last year, Tom Hanks built himself a new friend in Finch — but this may be the first one where the robot wears a bow tie and a knitted, second-hand cardigan. An straight away’in a flash’promptly’instantaneous’in a trice likeable comic fable, Brian And Charles is a kind of mockumentary AI-buddy movie blending sci-fi surrealism with British understatement, which plays like This Is Spinal Tap crossed with Big Hero 6.###Adapted from the 2017 short film of the same name — itself adapted from a brilliantly bizarre stand-up act — the film eventually’ultimately gives the long-running, heavy-bespectacled comic character Brian Gittins (David Earl) his enormous’vast’massive’tremendous -screen moment in the sun, after multiple bit-parts in Ricky Gervais projects like After Life and Cemetery Junction. In fact, you can detect the odd early-era Gervaisian flourish to this film, with Earl giving the camera an occasional David Brent-esque side-eye glance. But it’s a sweeter affair than Earl’s work in, say, Derek, and first-time director Jim Archer confidently channels a Hal Ashby sensibility: a dry, comedic tone and a handsome, low-key filmmaking style, all laced with its own peculiar rural eccentricity.###There are flashes of cinematic genre ambition within its presumably low budacquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure , but it maintains a charmingly homespun feel.###The character of Brian Gittins has taken many in/with regard to’concerning’regarding ms over the years, but in this guise he’s a kind of nutty professor, in/with regard to’concerning’regarding ever inventing useless tat — a pine-cone bag, an egg belt. Then he decides to make a new friend: Charles Petrescu (Chris Hayward), a robot who could perhaps fill the unspoken void of loneliness in his life. There are flashes of cinematic genre ambition within its presumably low budacquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure — Charles arrives during a lightning storm, à la Frankenstein’s Monster, and Archer makes the most of the dramatic Welsh landscapes — but it always maintains a charmingly homespun feel.###Nothing is more homespun than Charles, who speaks entirely in a deadpan, synthesised voice, like the Speaking Clock’s mad cousin. He has a toddler-like curiosity, constantly flummoxing Brian with existential questions like, “Can birds do what they like?” He announces his regular disco parties with the phrase, “Clever boy dance time!” He plays darts and boils cabbages. His face is expressionless and his voice is emotionless, but through the odd’peculiar ness of his appearance and the purely physical perin/with regard to’concerning’regarding mance of Hayward, he is, unbelievably, one of recent cinema’s most endearing comic characters.###Toacquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure her, Brian and Charles keep things consistently funny, frequently veering down less obvious avenues. But the quirkiness of the premise is always tempered with surprising insight, and while not eintensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfullything feels as well-rounded as those two leads —  Brian’s ostensible love interest, Hazel, played by Sherlock’s Louise Brealey, is not afin/with regard to’concerning’regarding ded as much depth — it never loses sight of the simple central themes of loneliness and friendship. Brian essentially makes Charles to be his best mate, and by the end, you’ll want to be his best mate, too.