Micro Men, BBC4, Thursday 8 October 2009
For a certain generation of computer gamers, the mere mention of names like Jet Set Willy or Repton are likely to induce a misty-eyed nostalgia, in the same way Sonic the Hedgehog or Super Mario do for gamers brought up on Sega and Nintendo.
Before the invasion of the Japanese gaming giants in the late 80s and early 90s, Britain already had a home-grown home computing heritage to boast of, as last night’s Micro Men reminded us.
Shown as part of BBC Four’s Electric Revolution season, Micro Men took an affectionate look at the early 80s home computing rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair (played by Alexander Armstrong) and his ex-employee Chris Curry (Martin Freeman), the entrepreneurial masterminds behind the Sinclair and Acorn companies respectively. The story focused on the race between the early home computer pioneers to gain the dominant market share, pivoting on a lucrative BBC literacy project that would see the victor’s machine in many of the UK’s schools.
Armstrong’s portrayal of Sinclair was particularly outstanding, playing him as a temperamental tyrant, prone to violent outbursts at anyone who questioned his visionary genius (at one point you expected Armstrong to hiss “kill them!” down the phone to his secretary, à la his Blowfeld-type character on The Armstrong and Miller Show). In one memorable scene, Sinclair tracks down his former colleague in a pub and assaults him with a rolled-up newspaper that carried an Acorn advert that dared to highlight the high return rate of faulty ZX Spectrums.
It was fun to see the period of the time so accurately evoked. This was a world where 48K RAM was a hot selling point and faulty connectors were fixed with Blu-Tack; where bosses and boffins chain-smoked in pokey, beige offices and ate takeaways with screwdrivers and soldering irons as cutlery; and where, in the face of nearly three million people out of work, Britain had a growth industry to be proud of (as evidenced by stock footage of Margaret Thatcher showing off a Sinclair computer to the Japanese prime minister).
There was also some lovely retrospective jokes, such as Sinclair scoffing at the notion that home computers could replace going to the supermarket or bank, and Curry’s bank manager, played by Peter Davidson (who, during the period Micro Men is set in, was playing Doctor Who) describing Curry’s career choice as “very science fiction”.
Inevitably, in typical boom and bust fashion, the glory days were not to last: Sinclair sold his computing division to Alan Sugar’s Amstrad in 1986 and Acorn sold its majority shares to Italian company Olivetti. In a somewhat poignant final scene, we saw Sir Clive driving defiantly down the road in his famous flop, the C5 electric tricycle, as he is overtaken either side by two massive juggernauts bearing the names Microsoft and Hewlett Packard.
Paul Bovey
I’ve just been watching a trailer for the new BBC Three documentary series Undercover Princes. Basically, the programme follows three princes - one from South Africa, one from India and one from Sri Lanka - who are all bachelors and looking for love, coming to England to develop their dating skills and perhaps meet the partners of their dreams. The only stipulation is that they don’t let on they’re from royal stock.