BBC Four is booting up its short Electric Revolution season tonight - a series of documentaries - and one drama - covering the consumer technology explosion. After last week's Watchdog vs PS3 debacle, this is yet more required viewing for Gamesblog readers - though hopefully, it should be a much more positive experience.
Tonight's offering is Upgrade Me, in which poet and novelist Simon Armitage analyses our obsession with gadgetry. The key stuff for us, though, begins tomorrow with Electric Dreams (21:00pm), in which the Sullivan-Barnes family from Reading is filmed experiencing life via three decades of contemporary gizmos. They spend a week in each era, using only the electrical products of the time: for the seventies (which forms the basis of tomorrow night's episode) that means a diet of Pong and top-loading washing machines; for the eighties, it's Big Trak and the ZX Spectrum.
As for the nineties... well, just wait and see who turns up with a PlayStation...
Then at 10pm tomorrow, there's Gameswipe, Charlie Brooker's no doubt acerbic glance at game culture. I'm also looking forward to Micro Men, the 90-minute drama following the rivalry between Clive Sinclair and Chris Curry, each hoping to dominate the early eighties home computer market. Check out the trailer here - Alexander Armstrong is absolutely uncanny as the ginger bearded creator of the ZX81.
Interesting stuff, then - but not nearly enough of it. The BBC archives must be stuffed with fascinating technology and videogame reportage from the last thirty years - and surely not all of it is on YouTube. Famously, a BBC documentary crew was present when legendary 8bit development studio Imagine combusted (you can see the result here) - I'd love to see an update to that, catching up with where all the staff are now.
Game culture is criminally neglected on TV - Electric Revolution is a promising undertaking, but it's a brief one.
