The story of Britain's least-appreciated inventor

In the nineteen-eighties, the landscape of the electronics world was changing rapidly. SpuntTech started the decade as an industry leader, but disaster was always just one mis-innovation away.

Like many products which Albert put his name to, the Spuntridge music system had a very short lifespan. Users frequently complained that Spuntridges would jam in their holes; of poor audio clarity; of the lack of a 'play' button on some of the cheaper models; and that the spool of narrow gauge, high tension steel cable within the Spuntridges would occasionally snap and flail around, dismembering anybody who stood within ten feet of the sound system.

Spunt attempted to address some of these defects with warning stickers, but the BBC's new Watchdog program wasn't impressed, and Jeremy Paxman branded the product "a potential deathtrap." All remaining units were recalled across the UK and Spunt grudgingly promised that no other consumers within the first world would again be harmed by one.

Worse still, the Spunticle, into which Albert had sunk more than half his personal fortune, quickly became a laughing stock - followed by a mourning stock, when a specially designed 'Spunticle-route' was inadvertently laid parallel to and in places converging with newly opened M25 resulting  in 232 deaths and a national front bumper shortage.

1988 - Trying to compete with other handheld gaming platforms, which were fast gaining popularity at the time, SpuntTech launched the "Spunt HandJob for Boys."

Unusually, the HandJob was based around the Soviet-built TBT-478 rocket targeting microprocessor, as Albert had come into posession of a job-lot of eight hundred thousand of them the year before at a Burmese casino. Also, unlike the gaming platforms it competed against, it displayed its images on a miniaturised cathode ray tube, displaying images on a 0.7" screen. Like most SpuntTech products, it didn't live up to the hype, with disappointing performance, short battery life , was far too heavy and resulted in several deaths.

Controversy

The final nail in the HandJob's coffin was the decision to license out game development to literally any software developers, as long as they promised to get titles on shelves before Christmas.

A tragic lack of background checks resulted in totally inappropriate and politically suspect games being stamped with the SpuntTech logo and, before long, a media witch-hunt which saw the brand forced into liquidation.