“I hope I’m portraying him sympathetically,” says Alexander Armstrong, still readily recognisable beneath the square glasses, bald cap and ginger beard that transform him into the Clive Sinclair of nearly 30 years ago. It’s five in the afternoon, and the star of The Armstrong And Miller Show and occasional Have I Got News For You presenter has been on set in stormy West Drayton for something like 12 hours already. But he’s so consistently cheerful, you half expect him to burst into character from one of his old TV ads: “Hang on: three hours in make-up, playing one of the two leading figures of the 1980s home computer industry – I make that Pimm’s O’Clock!”

Clive – now Sir Clive – Sinclair is the main protagonist of Syntax Era, the working title of a 90-minute drama described by BBC Four as ‘an affectionately comic account of the ’80s race for home computer supremacy’. A former ZX Spectrum owner himself, Armstrong sees the role as a chance to celebrate Sinclair’s computing achievements, rather than just the ill-fated C5 electric car that the public tends to remember him for. “I’ve always felt the need to fight Sir Clive’s corner – he was a bit of a hero to our generation,” Armstrong enthuses. “As I see him, he’s rather brilliant but flawed – had he been more collaborative in his approach, he could easily have been our Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. This is the story of the schism between him and Chris Curry – if they’d stuck together and Clive had just not been so arrogant, it would have been fine.”



Curry – Sinclair’s former employee turned archrival when Curry’s Acorn Computers was awarded the contract to produce the BBC Micro – is the other major player in the story. It’s a rivalry that spills over into a celebrated ‘fight’ in their local Cambridge pub, plus what Armstrong calls “a fantastic scene between Sinclair and Curry – as Curry’s walking home one night, I try to mow him down in my C5, and he can basically outrun me…” Some of Sinclair’s frustration seems to stem from the fact that he’d also been in the running for the lucrative BBC computer literacy tie-in but, at least the way Armstrong is playing him, thought that he knew best.

“I think by that stage he’d become too arrogant,” theorises Armstrong. “He had started developing the Spectrum in one way, and then the spec of what the BBC wanted was going in a different direction. And he was convinced that, since he was the expert rather than the BBC, he should be telling them what they wanted, not the other way around. There’s a great line in this where he says: ‘They should stick to making Dr Who, or Watch With Mother’ – you know: ‘We’re the experts – I’m not going to be dictated to by the establishment, the government and the BBC’.”



“In this story – and I suspect in real life – when the establishment was with him, he was very happy to be part of it,” Armstrong extrapolates. “But when suddenly they were going with his rivals, he would get furious about Chris Curry and his ‘establishment connections’ – oh, yes: ‘There’s Chris Curry and his government friends…’ I think that was chiefly what cost him the contract, but he must have been a very serious contender there – imagine what would have happened if he had got it…”

Nonetheless, the Spectrum and its variants sold in vast quantities, giving many their first taste of home videogaming, although Armstrong thinks Sinclair had loftier goals: “He couldn’t abide the idea of his life’s work – the ZX Spectrum – being used predominantly for games; he hated the idea of it not being taken seriously as a computer. He’d done all this work, this amazing lifetime of achievement, and it was just represented by games – so he didn’t embrace the games market. Again, if he’d done that, he’d have had some change left over after the debacle of the C5. Instead, Atari and Commodore really took over games – he wanted the QL to be a much more serious machine, he had vaunting ambition for it.”