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I suspect the UK ones do away with the remote operator and just shunt you to a manned desk if there is a problem
That's also my understanding of how it works.
AFAIK the lady/gent in the booth next to the e-gates is not remotely checking everybody going through the e-gates, that should be handled by the automatic side of things (e.g. face recognition, data on the passport chip).
The Border Force Officer is there to act as a manual back up should the e-gate say "no", and I suspect that's more likely to be down to technical reasons (e.g. unable to perform the facial recognition) than because the individual is on some list.
If the OP is consistently failing to get through the e-gates I suspect there's something subtly amiss with the data being carried on the passport.....but excuses aside I agree, whatever the reason it's ****** annoying, and so far the e-gates system is nowhere near as good/consistent/slick as the aforementioned Iris system (then again not many used Iris, perhaps that's why it seemed so slick).