‘Coppola is a huge ZX Spectrum fan’: Inside the cult of Clive Sinclair’s wonky computing wonder

The Eighties are remembered as the decade of big ideas and bright colours, but one of the era’s most defining cultural artefacts was the precise opposite. Sir Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum home computer was a minimalist slab of plastic and rubber, topped off with rainbow stripes down the side – a masterpiece of understatement in an age of overkill. And if you were the right age during its glory years, there is every chance it is a defining part of your childhood. 

The importance of the Spectrum to Eighties kids is celebrated in a wonderful new documentary, The Rubber-Keyed Wonder, by husband and wife filmmakers Nicola and Anthony Caulfield – though, as they point out, the Speccy’s iconically squidgy keys technically weren’t rubber. 

“We shouldn’t say rubber-keyed actually – we discovered that it’s actually an elastomeric keyboard,” says Anthony, whose life was transformed when he received a Spectrum at the age of 10. “But ‘the elastomeric wonder’ doesn’t have the same ring as the rubber-keyed wonder.”

Whatever those iconic keys were made of, the Spectrum, which would sell five million units from its launch in 1982, was a pop culture lodestar in an era when technology was still utilitarian and bland. Decades before the cult of the iPhone, it boasted breathtaking design, topped off with that fantastically futuristic Sinclair font.

As the new documentary acknowledges, however, it was a flawed masterpiece. There was no “off” switch, the keys were sticky and frequently wore out. Innovative but a bit weird and wonky, the Spectrum was made in the likeness of its eccentric creator, Clive Sinclair – a cross between Steve Jobs and a comic egghead from a Monty Python sketch. 

“The [Sinclair] carried his name,” says Anthony. “He wanted that brand of the slightly eccentric British boffin. That was the brand.”

History has not been kind to Sinclair. He was one of the great innovators of his age, driven to create affordable technology that could be enjoyed by the average household. Hence, the Spectrum’s family-friendly price point of £125 for the 16K model [Kilobyte being a unit of measurement for computer memory – the higher the number, the more powerful the computer]. That’s the equivalent of £500 today – half the price of its closest competitor, the Commodore 64. 

Sinclair would make a lot of mistakes – such as his disastrous 1984 business computer, the QL, with its notoriously unreliable “Microdrive” magnetic tape storage system. His downfall, however, was the C5, a pioneering electric buggy, which had the misfortune to resemble a dystopian wheelbarrow and, when unveiled in January 1985, reduced him into a figure of fun. It was a humiliation from which he would not recover for the rest of his life – Sinclair died in 2021, aged 81 – and which has overshadowed the remarkable success of the Spectrum. 

“Everyone talks about the C5,” says Nicola. “But there was an awful lot more to him. That didn’t take off, but he was ahead of his time with wanting [release an electric vehicle]. When we started doing the movie, we didn’t realise the stuff that had come before the Spectrum. It was important to us to get a lot more in about Sir Clive and what he did – and the fact he wanted to make everything really British. He wanted to keep as much of the manufacturing here as possible.”

The Spectrum marked the dawn of the home computing age in the UK and throughout Europe (it also had a big following in Ireland, Italy and Spain). 

But it wasn’t the only computer vying for a coveted space in Eighties’ living rooms. Rivals included the aforementioned Commodore 64, the VIC-20, the Dragon 32 and the hulking BBC Microcomputer – the last a fun-free anti-Spectrum created by former Sinclair executive Chris Curry. 

Yet, with the exception of the C64 (huge in Germany), all are now forgotten, while the Spectrum is not. Though designed by Sinclair as an educational device, it turned out to be the perfect games machine – inexpensive, relatively easy to program and with enough memory to create truly ambitious shoot ‘em-ups, platformers and strategy adventures. Long before Nintendo and PlayStation invaded the UK, it was the Spectrum and hits such as The Lords of Midnight, Atic Atac, Knight Lore and Head over Heels that introduced kids to the wonders of gaming.

The gaming revolution produced real mega-stars, too. In The Rubber-Keyed Wonder, David Jones, who created the best-selling Magic Knight trilogy (not to be confused with the other British game designer named David Jones, who was behind Lemmings and the original Grand Theft Auto), recalls how he went from coding in his bedroom to coding in the bedroom of the house he had bought with his gaming earnings. “They were now rock stars with their sports cars”, says Anthony. “They were writing the games, getting the royalties.”

The cult of the Speccy is truly universal. When they arrived at the London premiere for The Rubber-Keyed Wonder, the Caulfields were surprised to discover that Francis Ford Coppola was hosting the first screening of his grand folly Megalopolis in the same BFI building at the Southbank. Coppola, it transpired, was a Spectrum fan. They learned this from former Sinclair Research managing director Nigel Searle, who shared a story of being button-holed by Spectrum devotee Coppola years previously.  

“When we were interviewing Nigel Searle, right at the end of the interview he said that Francis Ford Coppola came up to him on an internal flight in America,” they recall. “Coppola said, ‘I recognise you from Sinclair User [magazine],’ which is even more crazy. Nigel’s face was always in there because he was the spokesman of Sinclair. They sat next to each other and chatted for about an hour. He [Coppola] collects [computers and other gadgets], he’s a Sinclair fan.”

When they learned that Coppola was in the building for the Megalopolis screening, Nicola and Anthony invited him to attend their film. He was too busy – but he did the next best thing and inspected the Spectrums they had set up in the foyer. 

Coppola isn’t the only closet Spectrum fan. In The Rubber-Keyed Wonder, radio presenter James O’Brien describes how his Spectrum shaped his childhood. The 8-bit video games era also inspired Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror – specifically its interactive 2018 episode Bandersnatch, about a Spectrum programmer who cracks while attempting to code a new game to an impossible deadline. 

It is widely understood that Bandersnatch was inspired by the sad story of Matthew Smith, a Syd Barrett-like figure who created the iconic early Spectrum platform hit Manic Miner but went “through hell” producing the follow-up Jet Set Willy and left the industry soon afterwards. 

“When he wrote Manic Miner it was fun. He had no boss,” says Anthony. “He was able to write it when he wanted to. Whereas with the success of Manic Miner, with the sequel there was pressure on him to deliver it. With some creatives, when they feel that pressure they can crumple a little bit. Sadly, I think that’s what happened to Matthew.” 

The Rubber-Keyed Wonder traces the rise of Sinclair and the Spectrum and its rapid demise when the delayed release of a 128K model of its Spectrum + l brought on a cash-flow crisis. The majority of the company was then bought in 1986 by Amstrad’s Alan Sugar, who saw the Spectrum as an entertainment machine, whereas Clive Sinclair had regarded it as an educational device and was sniffy about games. With Sinclair having sold the business, in late 1986 Sugar released the Spectrum +2, a Spectrum aimed at gamers, with a better keyboard, a joystick port and an inbuilt tape deck for loading games.

But beyond telling the history of Sinclair Research, the film is a love letter to the Spectrum and to the first generation of kids who grew up not on pop music or television – but on games such as Jetpac, Sabre Wulf, Dun Darach, The Hobbit text adventure and countless others. 

Such titles may look primitive by today’s standards, but given the limitations of an 8-bit, 48K computer – the most popular Spectrum model – they were astonishing achievements which, with their often complicated storylines and innovative play style, represented a huge leap forward in game design. 

“They were pushing the limits of the machine. A lot of the game developers said, ‘We just looked at it and thought anything was possible,’” says Nicola. “They just went for it.”

The Rubber-Keyed Wonder will be screened at select cinemas from October 18. More details at graciousfilms.com