Britain's Greatest Inventor: Clive Sinclair and the C5 (Part 3)
Josh Widdicombe's Archive of Pop Culture
Keep It Light Media
4.8 • 956 Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2026
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the third episode of this series, Josh Widdicombe and comedian and friend Tom Craine discuss the unbelievable story of Britain's greatest inventor - Sir Clive Sinclair and his success (and failures) in shaping the landscape of technology and computers.
Coming up in this episode - the disastrous launch of the C5 and collapse of the computer industry leave Sinclair in a precarious position…
And rival Alan Sugar smells blood in the water and swoops in to exploit the opportunity…
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to part three of the rise and, well, let's hope, rise and rise and rise of Sir Clive Sinclair and the C-5. |
| 0:13.8 | It might still work out, although I say that. |
| 0:16.5 | Coming up in this episode, we have the disastrous launch of the C-5 and the collapse of the computer industry |
| 0:22.0 | leaving Clive in a terrible position. And who's that? It's only little rival Alan Sugar who smelt |
| 0:28.2 | blood in the water and is swooping in to exploit the opportunity. |
| 0:43.4 | So there's a fear at this stage in the story that it might fail. |
| 0:44.3 | Yes. |
| 0:45.9 | It's got that feeling. The sneaking suspicion. |
| 0:47.5 | Simply because on the way here I didn't see many singler C5s on the road. |
| 0:50.5 | No, that is true. |
| 0:51.8 | Yeah. |
| 0:52.2 | And also we did start by discussing how it was the biggest product failure in the history of |
| 0:56.3 | Ruin. |
| 0:57.0 | It was also that. |
| 0:58.1 | That was that clue. |
| 0:59.3 | Yeah. |
| 0:59.7 | And also there was everything that's led up to this point in the story. |
| 1:03.3 | I think it's worth thinking about why products fail. |
| 1:06.4 | Yes. |
| 1:06.8 | Between VHS and Betamax, there's a thin line. |
| 1:10.7 | Yeah. Shall we revisit our old friend Sir Lord Alan Sugar? The Amstrad emailer of the early 2000s. Was that a phone? It was a kind of smartphone. Yeah. One of the first... But it was like a desktop phone, wasn't it? Is that right? No, sorry, yeah, it's not a smartphone. It's like an all-in-one telephone. Yes, that's what I thought it was. It's an all-in-one telephone that sends emails. So it's kind of a percuit smartphone. Yeah. Why did it fail? Well, I would say the fact it charged per email. Amazing. Because obviously at the time there was, I don't know, maybe you were still charging per text. You know, when we had our Nokia's, that was the case, isn't it? You had enough data or whatever, it was credit for, I don't know when I stopped chart paying per text, probably much later than I remember, probably when I moved to smartphones. Yeah. So it just felt like the way things were going. But obviously, that isn't the way things were going. Email is unfortunately difficult to charge for. But I suppose that was a point where this was like the next step after the letter, wasn't it really. Yeah, you charge for letters. You charge for texts at the time. So there's a logic. |
| 2:17.9 | It makes fatal sense. |
... |
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