Well, they cut quite a bit of my appearance, but there I was in 1996, bringing a PlayStation to the door of the Sullivan-Barnes household, playing a small part in BBC Four's entertaining Electric Dreams series. The nineties episode was a feast of retro hardware, providing a Game Boy, Game Gear, SNES, Mega Drive (all launched in the late-eighties in Japan, but after 1990 in Europe) and of course the PlayStation. No sign of the Saturn or N64, though, but then the programme makers also had to squeeze in mobile phones. And bread makers...
So what did you think of the series? I reckon it succeeded in its aim of showing how technology has shaped family life over the last four decades. In the seventies everyone huddled together around Buckaroo, as much for warmth as entertainment, while in the eighties the arrival of personal stereos, miniature hi-fis and cheap home computers led to segregation as the kids migrated to their rooms and dad wrestled with the BBC Micro instruction manual.
Through archive footage, the producers also showed how media responses to technology changed hugely during the era. In the seventies, they had the wonderful clip from Tomorrow's World in which Raymond Baxter plays an ancient Pong derivative with wonderment dancing in his disbelieving eyes. Then in 1993 came the nightmarish James Bulger murder and the sudden fear and abjection aimed at games like Mortal Kombat, which - as the Sullivan-Barnes discovered, looks pretty ridiculous today.
Also, you forget how crap the internet was in the nineties - all comic sans and dancing baby animations; it was just a decade ago! I do think both this and Gameswipe could have spent longer looking into the home computer scene of the '80s, if only because this is when Britain's most important and well-known game designers were starting out. Perhaps that's a subject for another series - and if they need an 'experienced' 'presenter'...
