Screen duel sprouts from Acorns

Will sparks fly when the BBC unveils a drama depicting the battle between two British boffins locked in a race to dominate the home computer market?

Syntax Era documents the early Eighties rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair, the maverick visionary, and Chris Curry, his former colleague.

Alexander Armstrong plays Sir Clive, whose ZX81 computer, launched in 1981, sparked a gaming revolution in Britain. Martin Freeman, of The Office fame, plays Curry, who quit Sinclair’s team to co-found Acorn Computers, hitting paydirt with the BBC Micro. Sir Clive fears that the BBC Four film, expected to dramatise a dust-up between the pair in a Cambridge pub, will prove less reliable than an original issue ZX Spectrum. “I haven’t been consulted,” he tells us. “Chris is very animated about it. He thinks it will be misleading from what he has heard.”

Sir Clive, who followed his C5 moped with the folding A-Bike, adds: “It will probably be quite insulting but I doubt I will complain.” The BBC promises an “affectionately comic account”. But will Sir Alan Sugar, whose Amstrad bought Sinclair’s company, also feature?

Model's walk on the wild side

The face: Karen Mulder

It’s a long journey from the Paris catwalk to the chic 8th arrondissement’s police cells. But after being arrested over a complaint that she harassed a cosmetic surgeon friend who refused to carry out an operation, Karen Mulder’s war against the beauty industry has taken a bitter turn.

One of the original supermodels, who didn’t get out of bed for less than £10,000 a day, Mulder, 39, said later that she always hated being photographed. The daughter of a tax inspector from The Hague in the Netherlands, Mulder has never had an easy relationship with fame.

The face of Chanel, called The Blonde with Class by Vogue, Mulder shared the catwalk with Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and her friend Carla Bruni. But she retired abruptly in 2000. A year later she attempted suicide, spent five months in a psychiatric unit and claimed that senior French politicians and policemen used fashion models as “sex slaves”. She was detained while Parisian police investigated her telephone records.

Christian Bale didn’t bond with Johnny Depp on the set of their 1930s gangster film Public Enemies. “I didn’t want to talk unless it was while we were doing a scene. I enjoy it that way,” said the method actor. “Johnny seemed happy to do it that way, too, so I guess the answer is no, we really didn’t get to know each other better between takes.”

At least Depp wasn’t on the receiving end of one of Bale’s infamous rants.

Memories of politics at its dirtiest were revived at the launch of Arena of Ambition, Stephen Parkinson’s history of the Cambridge Union. Arianna Huffington joined fellow ex-president Lord Lamont of Lerwick at the English-Speaking Union bash. “It's a very accurate account,” admitted the former Chancellor, who recalled a motion: “This House believes that Max Mosley should be jailed”. Mosley, a secretary of the Oxford Union, once campaigned under the slogan Free Speech for Fascists. One problem sending Mosley to a dungeon though — he might enjoy it.

Anyone for tennis? Not Sir Peter Blake. “We had a bad experience at Wimbledon last year,” the Pop Art pioneer says at the murmurART opening at Selfridges. “I paid quite a lot of money in an auction to go. They cancelled the lunch and we went to the Members Room. I didn’t know you were supposed to wear a tie and somebody, really rudely, yelled across the room, ‘You should have a tie on!’. It put me off for ever. That’s why we don’t have any English players, it’s too middle-class. There are no hungry kids coming through, they’re too comfortable — but they’ve got a tie on.”

Postscript

Sir Elton John named the very heterosexual ex-Watford and England football manager Graham Taylor as his “gay icon” in the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition. Was he chuffed? Not sure. His spokesman says he’s on holiday.

Got a story to tell: people@thetimes.co.uk

Explore Celebrity

• People

Times recommends

• Live chat: Thrifty ways to update your winter wardrobe
• Is anybody out there really listening?
• Nutrition Q&A: Will eating late make me fat?