Welcome to Micro Men, the BBC4 programme of the story of the fight for the home computing market of the late 70s and early 80s. In the red corner – Clive Sinclair of Spectrum Computing (Alexander Armstrong). As portrayed in this drama, he resembles a ginger monk with glasses made out of a Ford Cortina windscreen, talks like an autotuned Confucius and is obsessed with 'elegance'. Anybody that imagines 'elegance' to mean 'a personalised electric car looking like an egg box on wheels' must be a pioneer, right?

Meanwhile in the blue corner, we have Chris Curry, original business partner of Clive Sinclair who, having foreseen the home computing market but received no backing from Clive Sinclair, sets up Acorn Computing with Hermann Hauser. Chris Curry is played by Martin Freeman, which proves to be somewhat distracting. Or as my dad said “my, that Tim from that Office has done well for himself, hasn’t he?”

The Sinclair/Acorn schism is in a sense an age old story. Young Turk foresees future before Old Master and leads a disparate bunch in a rebel fight against the empire. So far, so Star Wars. Except, er, less with the lightsabres, more with the bri-nylon. The clothes in this programme are a sight to behold and are obviously meant to 'tell us things'. For example, you can tell that Hermann Hauser is an Austrian and therefore SOPHISTICATED as he wears a polo neck. Obviously. Meanwhile, the lab rats of Acorn prove that the company was not only adept at the mass-production of home computers, but also home Jarvis Cocker clones.

Anyway, sorry, I got distracted. And therein lies the difficulty with this programme. It has the potential to be a fascinating story. However, the programme makers go so all out on period detail (e.g. everyone smokes – mind you, by that definition 'period' means '2005') that we hear less about the ins and out of computing and more of the music of the era. Which, according to the composer of the original elements of the soundtrack, was much like a sound collage of Alison Moyet and The Knife having some sort of cross-generational epileptic fit. This is of course no bad thing. The programme makers also seem to suffer from Heartbeat syndrome (for those of you upon far-flung shores/with lives/both, this is a cop programme set in the sixties with a hysterically literal soundtrack) – despite having been a Kraftwerk fan beforehand, if anybody ever plays Pocket Calculator at me ever again I will rip their wires out. However, none of all this musical know-how seems to prevent a scene where Sinclair and Curry have lunch to a soundtrack of Hungry Like The Wolf, a mere 11 months before it was actually released. To flash forward to modern computing parlance for a second, EPIC FAIL.

Having said this, there is some level of content. The early battles in the war are largely won by Clive Sinclair and the Spectrum ZX81. Although upon the evidence provided by this programme, god knows this was only due to a tumbleweed-populated market. As with many fact-based dramas, the programme begins with the standard “everything in this drama actually happened except the stuff we made up” type declaration, so it is hard to tell what is fiction and what is fact. But if the scene where Clive Spectrum tells an interviewer with a straight face that a problem with a faulty RAM component on the ZX81 can be easily solved with a lump of Blu-Tack is anywhere near true, it's hard to know whether to weep at Sinclair's ineptitude or throw a street party in celebration of their sheer nerve.

The key centre piece is the battle of schools computing. The scenes showing the escalation of the battle for the BBC contract to a virtual arms race as probably the most enjoyable of the programme, with Sinclair's relatively well-drilled engineers pitted against Tim from The Office, the man from the Milk Tray ads and the Jarvis clones, who mostly stand around pulling wires in and out whilst eating Chinese takeaways with tools. Against all odds, Acorn pull it off and celebrate in style, 'style' meaning the entire office pulling some thrillingly abstract shapes to blaring funk. Sir, the Cocker-types appear to be malfunctioning, QUICK!

Disappointingly, the gaming aspect of this area is dealt with in a rather cursory way, although oddly given the runaway success of the Spectrum, this at least appears to be a true reflection of Clive Sinclair's attitude. To quote verbatim “Is this what I've been reduced to? Clive Sinclair, the man that brought you JETSET FUCKING WILLY!” The only indications we really get as to the explosion in gaming brought on by home computing is a scene in a shop where Chris Curry peruses shelf after shelf of games for the Spectrum and a dust-covered corner for the Acorn. Although as any school attendee of the 80s and 90s could tell you, Granny's Garden for the BBC Acorn was clearly where it was at. Ahem.

And this is where it all starts to go horribly wrong. The lack of games for the Acorn I mean, not Granny's Garden. For all their differences, Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry seemed to have one common, fatal flaw: a complete inability to realise the value in sticking to what they know. So Clive Sinclair decides that true world domination will be achieved once Sinclair can manufacture computers suitable for office use. Back in the blue corner, Chris Curry decides that schools and offices aren’t enough and that home computing is the way forward. Interestingly, although the programme is keen to portray Clive Sinclair as the key computing genius of the era, the impression you get from this programme is that it was Chris Curry that could see market trends, even if Acorn were less capable of implementing them. However, both men were also incapable of understanding basic market forces. The market became flooded by as many as 500 different computing companies, meaning that supply seemed to outstrip demand in a matter of days and the mass productivity of both Sinclair and Acorn was quickly left looking misguided and obsolete. Or to translate this from economic-ese to human-ese, the arse fell out of the computing market before you could say “Manic Miner”. Leaving 'that ghastly barrow boy' Alan Sugar and Amstrad to wade in and nuke everyone. Boo.

And watching the programme, I couldn’t help but agree that this was probably a bad thing. For all their battling and racing for the prize, both Sinclair and Acorn did genuinely seem to care about producing the best possible computers, almost as a form of art and science as much as a money-making enterprise. For a few years, world computing was dominated by people from a small island who stuck things together with Blu-Tack and ate Chinese food with screwdrivers. The final scene, where Clive Sinclair is overtaken whilst driving his much-loved electric car (shockingly less than 12,000 of these were actually sold – if anybody reading this actually has one, please treat this article as a proposal of marriage) by two huge Hewlett Packard and Microsoft juggernauts is all the more poignant.