Blog: Talking about Spectrums

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I was up and about early on Saturday morning to head to SURBITON which, despite my suspicions, turns out to be an actual place rather than a comedy made-up name. I don't know, first Croydon turns out to be real, now Surbiton - perhaps that package holiday to Narnia wasn't such a daft idea after all?

I was there to meet Professor Will Brooker and a couple of other Gentleman Of A Certain Age/Inclination to talk about people's memories of ZX SPECTRUMS for a film what Will is making. He said in his email that we should meet in reception and that we'd recognise each other by being the oldest people there. He was not wrong about this.

We spent the next few hours walking from floor to floor in the building. Kingston University (where we were) has colour coded FLOORS, and each room has at least one wall painted the colour of its floor, I guess so you always know where you are, as otherwise they all look exactly the same. His cunning idea was to film each of us talking against the backdrop of one of these coloured walls, again (I imagine) to make us (mostly) middle-aged white men look a bit different to each other, and also to echo the screen colours of the Spectrum. Having seen some screen shots later on I must say this was a GRATE idea!

We each did a brief interview on a different floor, keeping the three of us together throughout. This made it all feel a lot more comfortable, especially when you were the one talking as you could see the others nodding along with you. In between the interviews there were LENGTHY periods of us all just talking about ZX Spectrums, and most of THAT was someone saying the name of a game and the rest of us REMEMBERING. Saying "Dun Darach" or "Pyjamarama" OUT LOUD felt incredibly DECADENT, as these were SECRET WORDS that none of us had spoken out loud for DECADES. My BRANE started to hurt after a while as it was continually being forced to go and dig out information it hadn't accessed this entire century, but it was all a LOT of fun, and made me want to dash home and get an emulator running!

Once we were all done the four of us popped round the corner for a coffee, where much the same thing continued. The only sad thing really is that the film isn't due to be finished and shown until the futuristic space year 2022 - I don't know if I can wait that long!

posted 13/3/2019 by MJ Hibbett

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Manic Miner!!
posted 13/3/2019 by Gary

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