It must be accurate enough because Sinclair and Curry participated in the production but both carped a bit after it came out. It registers to me as a documetary-styled drama whose tone and general accuracy might make otherwise normal artistic liberties feel uncanny and sensational (at least to them).
Like the Sinclair resemblance is mostly there, but has such a sharp and alien quality to it he becomes almost Bowie-like, the nerd-who-fell-to-Earth. Whereas the real Sinclair was a more rumpled and googly presence.
The bald cap is so obvious that the docu-drama style of the movie gives the vague impression that the real Sinclair had a full head of hair but fastidiously applied a bald cap every day.
I had an Acorn Atom (precursor to the BBC Micro) here in Canada; they were haphazardly marketed in North America. Not bad, but a friend of mine started making Apple ][ clone PC boards and that was the end of the Acorn. Guy I worked with had the Sinclair, though, expanded out to extreme lengths. He loved it, kept flogging it long after it was the best low cost option
Also, in the US there were Apple II clones. For example, I had a Franklin Ace 1000, which was less than half the price of a real Apple II. However, these literally copied the Apple ROM and were eventually sued out of existence. There were later Apple II clones like the Laser 128 and even later Franklin clones that had a clean room reimplementation of the ROM that were actually legal though.
I had one of these (as I remarked above, started with an unpopulated board made by a friend, not a Franklin). Yeah, there were copied Apple ROMs in all of these, but, at least in my case, they resulted in a lot of revenue for Apple that they would not have had otherwise…there was no way I would pay the full price of an Apple II, would have probably gone with a Z80 machine instead, but I spent thousands in the Apple store for accessories like disk drives, monitors, software.
A slightly-revised BBC Model B was sold in the United States - but the marketing was a failure and it was withdrawn quite quickly. Most of the production run was modified and sold in the UK, so I think genuine US model Beebs are quite rare.
A real shame because it was the one 8-bit micro that not only gave the Apple 2 a run for its money, but was far superior in many respects.
That link was a wild ride! I never had anything to do with Horace myself, but I did work with William Tang, and one of my friends wrote the music to “Horace Goes Skiing”. I must pass that on to any other survivors of that era.
