Micro Men

Following on from the whole #WeLoveTheBBC thing, I’ve been up late tonight watching Micro Men – a BBC drama charting the stormy relationship of Clive Sinclair and Acorn’s Chris Curry in their race to dominate the British market for personal computers.

My dad bought an Acorn Electron in 1983. I spent the early 90s with an Archimedes firmly installed in my family’s “downstairs loo” – a tiny room created by partitioning the back of our garage, and the only free space for such a machine. (With all available deskspace now colonised by laptops, it now houses a tumble drier.)

Hence, I approached Micro Men on some level already rooting for Curry (portrayed by the incredibly likeable Martin Freeman), and – as such – couldn’t quite work out whether the writers had deliberately tried to set up Clive (below) as the “bad guy” of the narrative. Certainly, he was angry and arrogant, but I’d be interested to see how I might have reacted if I’d been born earlier, and my first exposure to computing had been through the Pickard family’s ZX Spectrum (rediscovered in the early 2000s while clearing out the loft).

(Sir Clive Sinclair, as portrayed by Alexander Armstrong)

Taken as a whole, the programme was light, frothy, 1980s nostalgia porn. While the narrative arc was clearly simplified and sanitised in the retelling, the programme was none the worse for it. The sound and production – in particular – were fantastic, anchoring the narrative firmly in the look and feel of 1980s broadcast media.

If you’re in the UK, you can catch Micro Men on the BBC iPlayer, where it will remain until sometime in the tail-end of  next week. And if you do, I’d be very interested to hear your reactions, or – for that matter – your memories of early British home computing.