When you’re discussing video game TV shows with anyone British who is over the age of 30, then names like GamesMaster, Bits and Thumb Bandits are likely to crop up.
However, games actually came to TV in the UK almost a decade before the likes of GamesMaster and Bad Influence arrived and tore up the rulebook. As highlighted to us by Larry Bundy Jr, Magic Micro Mission was broadcast way back in 1983 and, in some respects, was way ahead of its time.
Marketed as an “edutainment” TV series, Magic Micro Mission was produced by Central Independent Television and comprised of six 25-minute episodes, all of which were filmed during the summer of 1983 at the ATV Centre studios in Birmingham.
The show, presented by Adrian Hedley, Jo Wheeler, and Dr. John Barker, got in on the now-tiresome AI trend a few decades early by featuring an intelligent computer named Prune (voiced by Hilary Minster).
The first episode, shown below, features Ultimate’s Jetpac, the iconic ‘Big Track’ toy and Disney’s Tron. Even The Hairy Cornflake himself, DJ Dave Lee Travis, turns up to gush about how great computers are.
Chillingly, the “Egg Head” character (played by Barker) accurately predicts the terminally online, AI-driven hellscape we’re all hurtling towards:
When you get home, you’ll be able to do your banking and your shopping and your voting, even, in elections from your home computer terminal and with the robots running the factories, you won’t even have to go to work – you’ll be doing brain work at home using networks of computers linking you to other workers around the world.
Foreign languages won’t even be a problem, not even Brummie, because some of the computers in the network will actually help you do the translation and of course, you won’t have to live in the towns to be near the factories you can, in fact, live in a village or live in a holiday camp in Wigan if you please.
On the other hand, if you get fed up being stuck at home fiddling away with your terminals, then the solution is to take a portable computer with you, usually in radio link with your base at home.
In the future, these things will be equipped with voice communication so you don’t even have to fiddle away on the keyboard, and of course, they’ll be made smaller and smaller. People are talking nowadays about making wristwatch computers and pocket computers.