Produced last year as a made-for-TV movie, BBC Four’s Micro Men follows legendary inventor and home computer pioneer Clive Sinclair (Alexander Armstrong) as he battles it out with ex-employee Chris Curry (Martin Freeman), founder of Acorn Computers, for dominance in the fledgling market. The rivalry comes to a head when the BBC announce their Computer Literacy Project, with the stated aim of putting a PC in every school in Britain. When Acorn wins the contract, Sinclair is furious, and determines to outsell the BBC Micro with his ZX Spectrum computer.
Set during the 80′s computer boom, the program is an authentic dramatisation of the period and does a great job of weaving in stock footage from the BBC archives to create on of the most charming and well produced programmes of last year. Why am I flagging this up now? Well it was on BBC Four on Friday night, so you can still catch it on iPlayer for the next 6 days or so. It’s rare to find such a well produced made-for-TV movie in the UK these days and this took me by surprise. You can view it here.
The Embed is tempremental, If it displays “Content not Working” Click here to view on the BBC site.
jack johnson
May 25, 2010
At first i thought, wtf …..geek out, but it was so good.