“The microchip revolution was our rock and roll.” Nicola and Anthony Caulfield tell us about their new feature-length ZX Spectrum documentary, The Rubber-Keyed Wonder.
There’s a real buzz of excitement in the air as we talk to filmmakers Anthony and Nicola Cauflield about their latest documentary, The Rubber-Keyed Wonder. First, it’s world premiere night for their film about the ZX Spectrum computer and the late genius behind it, Sir Clive Sinclair; quite rightly, the Caulfields are thrilled that their work is showing on the gargantuan BFI IMAX screen in London.
Several engineers and programmers who alternately made or developed for Sinclair Research’s legendary 1982 computer are mingling in the foyer downstairs. There are even a few rubber-keyed Spectrums, hooked up to chunky CRT televisions, playing such bygone gems as Manic Miner and Bruce Lee.
There’s also another tinge of electricity in the air. A screening of Megalopolis is due to start right after the Caulfields’ documentary, and its maker, Francis Ford Coppola, is due to provide a Q&A. It’s said that Coppola had a keen interest in Sinclair products in the 1980s, so there’s at least a slim chance that he might make an early appearance in the foyer and maybe have a quick play of Atic Atac.
It was in this convivial, nostalgia-filled atmosphere that we met with the Caulfields to talk about their new film. Partly funded via Kickstarter, it’s not just about the games industry, like their superb From Bedrooms To Billions and its immediate follow-up films, but also about Sir Clive Sinclair’s broader contributions as an inventor. His pocket calculators; his electronic wristwatch; his research into AI; the computers that came before and after the ZX Spectrum.
It’s about his restless mind, which was both what drove his company to its biggest successes and, regrettably, its closure in 1986.
The Rubber-Keyed Wonder is therefore a detailed and lively look at a miraculous moment in British industry and the people behind it. Below you’ll find what the Caulfields had to say about the documentary’s making, the fascinating details that didn’t make the final cut, and why its title isn’t technically correct.
But first, there’s the topic of Francis Ford Coppola, and his (alleged) Sinclair fandom…
Anthony Caulfield: Yeah, [Coppola] is here. He’s a fan of Sinclair, apparently. Nigel Searle, the MD of Sinclair for many years, when we finished his interview… you know when you’re sitting there, packing up? He told me an anecdote of sitting on a plane, because he lives in the States. And he says, ‘This guy with long hair came up to me and went, “Are you Nigel Searle?” and he went, ‘Yeah. How do you know that?’
He goes, ‘I recognise you from the pages of Sinclair User.' [Searle] goes, ‘You read Sinclair User? What’s your name?’, he goes, ‘Francis Ford Coppola.’
And they had this chat for the next hour or so about how he’s a collector of Sinclair stuff. Nigel had no reason to exaggerate. So when we found out he’s here, we sent him an invite to see the film because if he’s a fan of Sinclair, we’ve got loads of Spectrum gear downstairs.
He’s here anyway. He’s coming in as we come out. He’s introducing his new movie [Megalopolis] after our film.
Nicola: We were just looking online at how the film was going and everything, and we were like, ‘Oh. Francis Ford Coppola’s actually gonna be there!’
Anthony: Of all the people! And I remembered that anecdote that Nigel Searle told me, and I thought, ‘It has to [happen]…’ So I messaged IMAX and they said, ‘We’ll do our best. We’ll forward on your request and we’ll see what happens.’ If he’s a Sinclair fan, then the Sinclair family are here.
Sorry, I’ve gone off on a tangent. But it’s kind of a film story, isn’t it?
Film Stories: It’s a tangent I very much like. A foot in both camps for Film Stories. So in making this, were you building off the research and contacts you gathered for From Bedrooms To Billions, to an extent?
Nicola: This film very much came from Bedrooms, actually. Because when we were making that film, we got to the point where we were looking at all the different computers, and we just couldn’t go into as much detail as we wanted to on the Spectrum. And the Spectrum was one of our favourites – I grew up with the Spectrum and everything. We thought it could have a film of its own. So we’ve always been thinking about doing this film. But it’s taken a little while – obviously, we did The Amiga Years, The PlayStation Revolution. Then we thought, ‘What’s our next move? We’ve got to do The Rubber-Keyed Wonder.’
Anthony: One thing I would say, when you talk about contacts, is that we pretty much started from scratch. Because if you think about it, we’re going back a generation earlier. So finding [computer scientist] Dr Steve Vickers again, and Richard Altwasser – retired ex-engineers. So we actually started by trying to track down as many of the surviving engineers as we could. Rick Dickinson [industrial designer] sadly passed away, but we got in touch with his wife. Phil, who worked with Rick for many years, gave us lots of drawings and sketches.
When we researched it, we realised that there was the actual Sinclair [Research] story. What happened after the Spectrum came out? Why did Alan Sugar buy them within such a short space of time?
So then we realised, as well as exploring the impact that it had on many children across the UK and Europe – the Spectrum was massive in Portugal, Spain and Italy, we mustn’t forget that – we thought, there’s another story here. Potentially a rise and fall story, particularly of Sir Clive Sinclair himself.
Read more: 10 splendid videogame documentaries you can watch right now
And as we got to know him more through interviewing other people, we began to think, okay. Very clever man. Very smart. But he gets bored. As soon as he’s done being successful at one thing, he’s gone on to the next, and it’s got to be ten times better.
But he invented the pocket calculator, which we all forget! It’s not acknowledged. There wasn’t a pocket calculator until Clive Sinclair invented one that could run on batteries.
He’s only ever known for the C5 failure, which if you even think about that was ahead of its time: it was an electric vehicle. So we realised there were all these story beats. And so rather than doing a British games industry story, we thought, no, it needs to be about the Spectrum, about Clive, what happened to the company, what was the man like, and the impact of that computer on other people.
Nicola: I think it’s quite nice as well to get his son and nephew in the film. We did have to start from scratch when it came to our interviewees, though, yeah. But it’s got that thread about Clive all the way through it, whereas our other films touch on various people. This one focuses mainly on Sir Clive.
He’s such an interesting figure as well, because he helped kickstart the British games industry without really being interested in it. He was baffled when the ZX Spectrum took off as a games machine.
Anthony: Yeah. Nigel Searle says in the film at one point, when the subject came up of anything peripheral to the Spectrum, especially games, Clive’s eyes would sort of roll. And yet that was the cash cow; he couldn’t see that but everybody else could. ‘We have an install base of five million-plus people. We could be selling them peripherals.’
You’d think that would be absolutely obvious. But if you think about it, in the early to mid 1980s, there wasn’t a computer industry; it was writing itself. He was looking at display technology and really advanced stuff; AI. Sophisticated AI technology in 1985. A laptop. There were a lot of ideas floating about.
When we got to know him better, and talked to his son and everything else, we sort of thought, ‘Okay, he’s the classic boffin. He gets bored with the last thing and always wants to make that new thing.’
Read more: The ZX Spectrum | Celebrating Uncle Clive’s greatest hit
It’s why I found it interesting with the Alan Sugar era, because when Alan Sugar bought the Sinclair brand in 1986, he knew how to sell it. He said, we aren’t going to try to sell it as an office machine – it’s a games machine. That’s it. We’re even going to have the cassette deck bolted onto the side of the computer so nobody can complain about not being able to load anything. That gave it another lease of life for another seven or eight years – well into the 1990s.
Nicola: I did like, though, when you had a separate tape deck. And that you had to pull the power out to turn it off! I never thought about it back then. The fact that you’d have to pull the power cord out.
Anthony: And you’d get a shock off it! I had to have Sellotape wrapped around mine because the plastic was wearing out. Because you’d continually have to do that to unplug it.
Nicola: But I never thought there was anything wrong with that because I’d never had anything like it before.
Yeah – for most people, including me, it was their first ever taste of computing. Do you ever think, 'what-if?’ What if Sinclair hadn’t lost interest and made a true next-generation ZX Spectrum?
Anthony: I’ll throw a what-if in. Nigel Searle tells me that when the QL, which was the next computer after the Spectrum, they were offered several months before the QL was released, they were offered a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. I think if Clive had made the decision to go for it, and not go with his own Microdrive system, which failed massively, I think that might have meant the QL could have [succeeded]. Because it had a lot of great attributes, but a really terrible back-up system with the Microdrive. I mean, a cassette-based system on a state of the art computer when you’ve got rival companies about to release 3.5 inch floppy drives? He could have gone for that.
But the reason is, he wanted to make his own technology. It’s a bit like Alan Sugar with the [ZX Spectrum] +3 when he came up with that strange disk drive. It never took off, but he was at least thinking, ‘Let’s keep it in this country, let’s design our own thing.’
I think the QL might have done it. The QL’s failure was like the Titanic hitting the iceberg. It was only a matter of time before they sank. Is that a good analogy?
Hey, I like it!
Nicola: It didn’t have a very good advert did it, the QL?
Him jumping over the computer. ‘It’s a Quantum Leap!’
Anthony: We’ve got that in the film. It’s hard to track down a good version of that. There’s a lot of outtakes. There’s Alison [Maguire], who’s in the film, who was in charge of software selling.
She said, ‘I hated that advert. It just made him look like an idiot. We never signed off on that. He just went ahead and did it.’ Really cold day in the park. Leaves coming down.
There’s a lot of little things like that. Because he was a brand in his own right. That geeky sort of brand. Even the C5, the day they picked for the launch – it was in November. In the driving rain. And it’s got no cover, so everyone’s driving around, getting soaked.
Nicola: I can imagine him being quite impatient. Him going, ‘I don’t want to wait. I’ve made it, I want it out there now.’ That’s just his mind. But you need people like that.
Anthony: He was selling the C5 for £300 or £350. I might be wrong but it was something like that. Because he wanted to do the same thing he did with the Spectrum – make it so cheap that everyone bought it. The problem is – what he was told was, if he’d have actually sold it for £1000, and just limited it to golf clubs, richer people would have bought it for the novelty. Then with the money that would have made, he could have built a version, the C6 or C7, and improved on the initial. So they were telling him things like that, and saying, ‘From a commercial standpoint…’ And he was going, ‘Nope! Get it released. Get it out.’
That was a terrible impression of him by the way. Please don’t use that. His family are coming. [Laughs]
What were you both playing on the ZX Spectrum, as younger people?
Nicola: No one has ever heard of this game that I played. It was called Chambers Of Horrors.
No, I haven’t heard of that one either!
Nicola: No one’s ever heard of it. It was really hard to play. You literally went from chamber to chamber, and there were spiders and skulls and what have you.
Anthony: It’s in the film.
Nicola: It’s in the film – I said we have to have it. I was saying the other day, I used to get the [educational games] like French Is Fun. German Is Fun.
Anthony: Someone actually used [the Spectrum] for their homework. Can you believe it? [Laughs]
Nicola: …but I did play 4D Time-Gate. I really enjoyed that.
Anthony: That’s a good game. You do see it in the film. A Quicksilva game. It was early – 1984.
Nicola: Jetpac.
Jetpac! That might have been one of the first ones I ever played.
Anthony: That’s [my favourite], Jetpac. I used to go to a friend’s house to be looked after, because my mum was at college, a mature student, and he had [a ZX Spectrum]. I remember. The first game he had on it was Jetpac. I just remember the colour. He had a colour portable TV, which wasn’t that common for a kid in their bedroom back then. And he wasn’t from a rich family – he just happened to have a colour portable. I just remember the smell of the Spectrum, and I remember thinking, ‘How do you turn it off?’
I remember him unplugging it. I was used to Japanese [tech] because my dad worked for Casio. So I was used to Japanese devices that had power buttons and things to turn them off. Whereas the lack of a power button, from speaking to the [Sinclair] engineers, saved the Spectrum something like £1.50 on its retail price, because they didn’t have to create the circuitry for the button. They just left it off.
Nicola: The feel of the keys was also just lovely. Though we have found out that they’re actually called an elastomeric keyboard. It’s not rubber.
Anthony: So your Film Stories audience can find out that we’re actually charlatans, and that the film should be called The Elastomeric Wonder! [Laughs]
Doesn’t really trip off the tongue, does it? The original Spectum had a better keyboard than the ZX81, though.
Anthony: We feature [the ZX81] in the film, because it did start the British games industry off. Football Manager started off on that. Even Quicksilva, and some of the companies that became massive in the early 90s, back in 1981 were doing peripherals or doing their own duplication. The ZX81 does play a part in starting things off.
It’s amazing to be able to capture that. Because for a long time, the games industry wasn’t taken seriously enough to be properly documented before it went away. Now there’s finally the realisation that these people aren’t going to be around forever.
Anthony: Yes. And IMAX have been so gracious in letting us have this for the premiere. And not only that, but letting us set the Spectrums up. For the public to be able to come in and play some of the games, just for one night, celebrate what was one of the most significant technological releases this country has ever had…
I think we knew at the time that it was something significant. The microchip revolution was our rock and roll. The Baby Boomer generation, through the 50s and 60s, experienced rock and roll exploding. The microchip revolution of the 80s was ours. This is why we’re documenting it now.
Anthony and Nicola Caulfield, thank you very much!
The Rubber-Keyed Wonder is out in UK cinemas on the 11th October.
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