You won’t read this in Steve Jobs’ autobiography, but in the early Eighties Britain led the world in personal computing. Acorn made the BBC Micro, which sold 1.5 million units. Sinclair Research shifted shed-loads of its ZX81, despite its rickety construction and coal-fired levels of performance. A generation of apprentice nerds produced their first bloops and squiggles on these devices. Today, no doubt they’re all writing apps for that iPhone you're reading this on.
But judging by the portrayal of the central characters in BBC Four’s Micro Men, Clive Sinclair and his employee-turned-rival Chris Curry, it’s a miracle either of them ever managed to make anything at all. Not that they did for long - by 1985 it was all over, thanks to a collapsing market and the inability of either of them to devise a workable long-term strategy. As scripted by Tony Saint, Curry (Martin The Office Freeman) was a charming chap who ran Acorn in an agreeably matey way, but had the business acumen of the bloke who invented the South Sea Bubble. More alarmingly, Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong), once Britain’s favourite businessman, came across as a malevolent, deranged fanatic, screaming f-words and hurling telephones through windows like the prototype for the present Beast of 10 Downing Street.
Unevenness of tone plagued the production, entertaining though it often was. For a start, it was impossible to gauge how seriously to take Armstrong’s impersonation of Sinclair. It was as if he’d rushed out of makeup before they’d quite finished with him. His bald head was quite clearly a piece of flesh-coloured shiny plastic, while his sideburns were obviously strips of velcro, coloured ginger and glued to the side of his face. Yet around him, everybody else played it perfectly straight, instead of pointing and laughing at his joke-shop disguise.
The term “designed by committee” kept springing to mind. Sometimes Micro Men was a science programme, plying us with facts about computers and showing us how to take them to bits. Sometimes it was a Social Studies module from the Open University, educating us about pop music, standards of living and the state of the stock market in the mid-Eighties. Sometimes it was satire, as Sinclair raged against the pre-Thatcher Labour government (“Bolshevik penny-pinchers” and “a Stalinist shibboleth”) or vented his spleen at Alan Sugar’s up-and-coming Amstrad (“ghastly barrow boys like this Amstrad fellow!”).
Much mirth was extracted by inserting Eighties adverts and film clips. How piquant to be reminded of the secret agent-style theme music from The Money Programme, fronted by the gravelly Brian Widlake, or to watch Margaret Thatcher introducing Japanese politicians to Britain’s computer revolution, speaking in the special very slow voice she reserved for those she considered to be complete idiots. A TV ad for Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum boasted of “up to a massive 48k of RAM” and “full eight colour capability”.
Despite its flaws, Micro Men did manage to convey a sense of that brief Eighties moment when our sclerotic isle seemed about to be launched into the future by white-hot technological revolution. Then the Americans nicked all our ideas and exploited them much better. How quintessentially British.
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