Hands up if you think you’re online too much. Now, unless you’re pathologically compelled to obey – without question – any order flung your way, chances are your arms are still down. If you did thrust your hand aloft, please go and wander in a circle while the rest of us ponder. Nowadays, most of us think we spend too much time on the tubes. But the sad fact is we’re too enraptured by sweet, sweet Internet to risk moving our hands too far away from the magical keyboard of dreams.

This satisfying yet soul-corrupting addiction wouldn’t be possible without the presence of a massive industry, now perkily monopolised by American industrial giants. As part of its Electric Revolution Season, BBC4 last night screened one of its now-ubiquitous docu-dramas concerning the rise and fall of the British home-computing contingent in Tony Saint’s Micro Men.

I like these quirky little BBC4 films. They inevitably concentrate on someone you’ve either never heard of or have totally forgotten about, like spy Tom Driberg or Steptoe’s Wilfrid Brambell, and are often chocka with sturdy performances. Given that, and having tossed in some eclectic, only-slightly-fabricated stories from history, you’re often left with a little gem of a film. Micro Men admirably lived up to such previous, only-slightly-fabricated classics such as I Shook Churchill’s Hand and Graham F. Holmes: The Man Behind Those Ketchup Dispensers That Look Like Tomatoes.

The programme gets ironic fairly early on. Clive Sinclair, sturdily played here by Alexander Armstrong as a sort of manic, repressed gerbil, tosses out of hand that there’s cash in home computing whilst simultaneously dreaming of the day electric cars would rule our roads. Maybe, as he calmly drifted to sleep one night, he also thought of how they could be endorsed by Hollywood celebrities ill-equipped to mask their self-satisfaction for having done so. Either way, we all know there’s boom and bust ahead for the plucky little programmers and so strap ourselves in for the ride.

I was hoping, maybe, for more of a critique on our changing relationship with personal computers. The film certainly hints at it, but only in the broadest of strokes. We get grainy, vox-pop sequences of people admitting they only use the computer to play Manic Miner and that’s about it. I guess the rise of the digital age is a story for another docu-drama (hopefully staring the ghost of Roy Kinnear as Bill Gates; no idea why) but dammit, BBC4 – this is when the home computer took off in Britain, and I wanted to get to the root cause of my addiction. I wanted to know if there was something my parents could’ve done.

The film instead concentrates on the continuing clashes – both personal and professional – between Armstrong’s Sinclair and Martin Freeman’s Chris Curry. It’s a neat little narrative with the two riding the crest of Eighties excess whilst bickering like a Linux user and an XP devotee. And if gnomic computer gags aren’t your scene, you can always revel in the production values. The fuzzy film look used throughout gives the whole piece a charmingly nostalgic twang, and every polyester fashion crash and 8-bit pixel is perfectly realised. There’s also a beautifully bathetic scene where the film tries – and it really really tries - to make early computer programming appear fraught with danger and slightly sexy.

And yet it remains compelling drama. The history is sidelined slightly in favour of letting the actors work with a good script, which is never a bad thing – even BBC4 viewers don’t want to be continually lectured. Kudos here especially goes to Armstrong for his careful portrayal of Sinclair, a character who, in less balanced hands, could easily have come off as bullish and unpleasant. Watching it, I somehow forgot my need for a of potted history of my burgeoning agoraphobia and just enjoyed the story. I didn’t check my emails for a full 85 minutes, and friends, for that noble sacrifice, I was left  with the picture of a curiously British innovator who clearly demands respect.

Especially as it turns out he was right about that stupid car.