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BBC4 just finished.

What an ace bit of telly.

I wanted to watch it but got carried away with Masterchef and hadn't realised it had started.

I'll download it and watch it at the weekend.

BBC4 does some ace telly and I wish I got round to watching it more, everytime I do put something on it's always entertaining and interesting.

Im going to i player this over the weekend

im gonna watch Masterchef on iplayer,but its obvious that mega Frenchies going to win.

Micro Men was really enjoyable. Glad I was flicking channels when it started, or I would've missed it.

Did you watch the first half with the lady who "tried to poison" them?

That was all way to over the top wasn't it Ben? Ok an error but that woman is trying to make a personality of herself by being far too icy. I very much doubt it would have poisoned her. The food did look disgusting though.

At least Roux Jr is as decent as he is honest about his criticisms. His bits are better than Wallace trying to hype up some scrambled eggs ffs.

It's quite entertaining all the same.

That Le Roux Sous Chef bint gets right on my titis. She comes across, in my opinion, as quite full of her own self importance. I do love Masterchef though and tonight's double bill was good. Cucumber Sorbet though? I think i'd puke.

Edit: I love Wallaces little talks on the food. "Umm, creamy, deep, thick, sweet, and that sticky little sour bite at the back of your thoat... Hmmm, oh yes, I could eat that all week."

Oh yeah definitely. Using the same knife and board you've just use to cut up a bloody raw rabbit to slice off a bit of butter is a bit school boy though. Definitely entertaining.

I loved the foreign lad who was told that he only got through because the lady fucked up so much. To start off with he didn't really seem to know what he was doing but he came together quite well.

I quite like Greg Wallace. Michelle Roux Jr. is also much better than the floppy haired twat on normal masterchef.

Jean Didier was a wild man. I thought he might've won just because he was a bit crazy with his food.

I'm loving masterchef. Think the ryan lad's gonna win it...

agreed. he doesn't seem ruffled at all, plus roux and his bit on the side keep winking at him

ha ha, doesn't he. he's confident, too, which goes a long way. They've been sucking him off from the start.

Still get really annoyed at the way Gregg Wallace eats, like he sucks the head of the spoon for an extra second.

Wallace has been doing my head in since day 1 on this series of Masterchef.  Just watch him.  He always speaks after Michel Roux Jr and I'm sure he must be under contract to simply parrot what the big man has just said.

He never disagrees with Michel Roux, never adds any new thoughts of his own...just backs up MRJ.  I'm really not sure what Wallace is doing there.

I like roux, although his eues look like they might fall out of his head.

On the subject of annoying tv programmes, FAST Forward is just bollocks isn;t it? main character's wife is lovely, though.

Do you mean FlashForward on 5 juddie? recorded them but not got round to watching any yet. Sounds like it's not worth the hummy space?

Incidentally, can I just register my disgust at a football forum being used to discuss the merits of a celeb cooking programme? Fucking metrosexuals, bet you all have a moisturising and skin cleansing regime as well don't you?

Do you mean 'Flash Forward' on Channel 5?  Have to say, I really enjoyed it.  You can pick holes in any sci-fi production if you want to, especially those involving time travel.  But some can be quite enjoyable if you're prepared to suspend your disbelief.  I'll be watching again next week.

it sounds interesting, i need to find somewhere to download flash forwards.

i tried to explain it second hand to the mrs and she looked at me as if i was retarded :(

Ardiles, you've just saved it from hummy oblivion. Although if it involves cooking and fancy sauces, it's going

Watched Micro Men late last night. Easily one of the best things I've seen on TV for a while, I loved my BBC Micro when I was a kid and seeing what went on behind the scenes was great. Not sure about the make up job they did for the bloke playing Clive Sinclair, looked a bit cheap and tacky.

I thought they could have bigged up Acorn a bit more. Might seem hard to believe but at their peak with the BBC Micro, Acorn were some distance ahead of Microsoft - their Basic language was better, their operating system was better, the disk operating system was better, their networking system was better and so on. The mistake Acorn made was keeping everything proprietary, if they had licensed everything out to other computer manufacturers things would most likely be a whole lot different than they are today. Having said that they did point out that most mobile phones now use a processor which started out life at Acorn, which is a pretty amazing legacy for a bunch of boffins from Cambridge.

My interesting fact of the day.... Brian Wilson (the long haired geek who was one of the computer designers at Acorn, you see his character a fair bit in Micro Men) has since had a sex change and is now Sophie Wilson.

that's it, flash forward, my apologies. Yeah, Joseph Feines' wife is hot in it.

I was picking it to shreds last night, but it's harmless entertainment for these dark nights.

Not sure about Flash Forward yet. Its biggest problem is that its living in the shadow of Lost, as its kind of ABC's follow up which they're hoping will take over from it when it finishes next year. Flash Forward might just need a while to get going and build up the mystery and story line.

I missed Micro Men, is it on iPlayer?

it is, i'm currently watching it

Sweeeeet. I recently found out that they've introduced an iPlayer tab on the PS3 dashboard, so I can watch it on the big telly instead of on my laptop :)

I will await your 'Oh my God, I can't believe you actually persuaded me to watch that ballacks' post over the weekend!

I know someone who still insists RISC OS is the best thing since sliced bread. He swears blind it's the most efficient operating system on the market and to be fair it could be, but he's hard to listen to.

Just kick him until he bleeds

Where they both made the fatal mistake, was going for each others markets. Speccy were games, BBC/Acorn were educational. And it was the software that made the spectrum, Of my all time top 20, at least 19 are speccy titles, I have never worked out why they havent rejigged/updated some of them.

I was a mid-1980s ZX Spectrum child geek.  (We were many.)  I bought a book from the school bookshop in 1983 or 1984 that taught you the rudiments of how to program in BASIC, and I used to write programs in my spare time...which was a little obsessive because I didn't actually own a computer at the time (just had sporadic use of a few ZX 81s in the school computer room).

A year or so later, I bought my first Spectrum with pocket money savings, second hand for £70.  It was then that I became a turbo-geek.  My favourite programming areas involved puzzles (continuing in the 1980s geek mode, one of my favourites involved a Rubiks cube simulator, complete with graphics) and creating fractal-like images with trigonometrical functions and the rudimentary 256 x 192 pixel display.  The rest of the time, I used to play car chase games with the volume turned down and Jean-Michel Jarre or the theme to Airwolf playing on my ghetto blaster.

Happy (pre-STFC) days.

The old ZX81 was my first machine which I got for Xmas 82 (which Mr TalkTalk now owns or did own for his Computer museum)

I then went on to have a career from 84 in programming which lasted for 18 years and I would not have gone into it if I hadent got that first Sinclair ZX81 with 16k expansion pack. Sir Clive has a lot to answer for with me!

I met Sir Clive Sinclair on the Tube in 1983 and had a little chat with him, he seemed a really nice bloke but the word geek does not even come close to this man "SuperGeek" is closer.

He was wearing a Tee Shirt that just had the word "Sinclair" emblazoned accross it, which I thought a little modest at the time!

Almost inevitable now, I'd have thought

Did Americans use Acorns and Sinclairs or was it a British thing?

Dragon 32, Commodore 64...computers had much better names in those days.

I got an O Level in computer studies, which basically was me getting "Fuck Off" to run in a loop on the screen. Mine was a comprehensive education...

I had both of those!

Don't forget the Oric & Jupiter....ace names!

The old Commodore Pet you could type "poke 1,0" and it overwrote the basic eprom.....sweet!

Vic 20 was naffly named though

But the name really suited what was a pretty naff product even back then. I had one and was bitterly jealous of my Spectrum-owning mates who could load Donkey Kong from tape in less than 20 minutes.

Less than 20 mins! wow turbo load! My C64 used to load "the Hobbit" in 38 mins and then used to crash regularly after 5 mins of play!

I used to have a Amstrad cpc464 and was always jealous of my mates with their C64s. They could get loads of Mastertronic and Codemasters games from boots for £1.99, and i could only get one or two.

My cassette deck broke as well, so begged my Dad to buy a C64 so we could swap decks if it broke again. His solution was to just use a paperweight to hold it closed, although it stayed down once play was pressed. :( Then one day, years later, he came home with a 386 for himself. It was like all my Christmases at once. :D

RISK OS was class :)

I think I might watch Micro Men on iplayer at some point this weekend.

I have Sky+'d it so I will watch it later, theres a whole series on Leaders of Technology apparently.

Ah, nostalgia...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6uwfM8F5uU

The 80's were great for us geeks, the birth of home computing for the masses. Who can forget buying a monthly computer magazine, typing in the 1000's of lines of code that they used to contain and then spending fookin' ages debugging/correcting your typos.

BBC and BBC Lite (Acorn Electron) - OK the BASIC was pretty good but lets be honest, for most of us games was what it was about.  And that was Speccy v C64. And of course the Speccy was more popular given it was cheaper, you could use a standard tape deck and games were easily copied.  But the C64 was better, obviously. Better graphically and the SID chip provided sound well in advance of its competitor.

Yoof of today, it's all graphics and generally gameplay suffers. But they'll never get the same sort of enjoyment we got from our simplistic games of yesteryear.

I have to agree Batch, even now I have a PC that can play any game available really fast but I still download C64, Speccy & Amiga emulators and play the games from them because the gameplay was and still is much better, yes graphically pretty shit but games seemed to put so much more emphasis on gameplay than graphics anyway.

Many a rainy Saturday afternoon was spent like this.  I used to buy Sinclair Programs and then graduated to Crash! which was more games oriented.  Agree that it's a shame the basic (no pun intended) programming element to popular computing has been lost.

For the C64 ZZap64 was the mag where it was at, I still have a few, including my pic in one of them :D

The old magazines with the basic games were always ace, but ultimately contained so many errors they rarely worked first time typed in and then saved to the trusty C30 tape.

ZX81 with a self made 32k ram pack for starters for me.  Off a bloke at mums work.
Mazogs and Donkey kong were my favourites.

spectrum next... 48k....combat lynx and knightlore were the kiddies and pheenix and Manic miner were good.

Lots of piracy going on....you could wang a load of games on shitty c9o tapes from the market.

Some used to take all day to load and then crash at the death!!!

Both were a British thing. I think the Sinclairs did ok in Spain and were pirated a lot in the USSR. But in the USA it was Commodore, and Apple to a lesser degree.

I rebought several early issues of Crash from Ebay a year or so back, anorak heaven. I always wished i was Kevin Toms...

Sorry John, the ZX81 went the way of that business  :(

Anyway - if anyone fancies a brief sojourn into BBC B/Spectrum/ZX/VIC/PET wonderland, pop along to the Swindon Museum of Computing in Regent Circus before a match one Saturday (only open on Sat).

http://www.museum-of-computing.org.uk/index.htm (http://www.museum-of-computing.org.uk/index.htm)

It's good for an hour or so and they have a few consoles powered up.

That sounds awesome! Do they have a picnic area? Do you know if I can download a risk assessment? I  wouldn't want to get injured.

Found this site last night.  I really miss the 1980s.

http://www.crashonline.org.uk/

Cheers, there goes cleaning the car...