Originally aired on ITV in 1980, Metal Mickey is an unconvincing, flappy-eared robot built by stereotypically bespectacled nerd Ken (there’s only a small jump from soldering together a Sinclair ZX80 and building an artificially intelligent robot, after all).

‘Hilarious’ comic situations arise from Mickey’s interaction with Ken’s family: an authoritarian bank manager father; a cretinously dim mother; an alcoholic gran; a trendy brother and sister with awful haircuts.

As Martin Anderson quite rightly pointed out in his Screen Robot Ready Reckoner, Mickey is essentially a ripoff of Twiki from the 1970s Buck Rogers series, right down to his ‘boogie boogie boogie’ catchphrase, and has all the charisma of a remote control car (which is essentially what he is). In fact, the production values in general are on a par the average amateur YouTube effort, with some extremely basic set design – Metal Mickey’s family live in what must surely be the biggest bungalow in England (the greenhouse alone is the size of Kew Gardens).

Ironically, Metal Mickey’s outdatedness is its only real point of interest – without the unnecessary distractions of jokes or plot, you’re free to ponder just how much society and television have changed over the last 28 years.

The show’s standard sitcom format – with its breadwinning husband, stay-at-home wife and unruly teenage kids – are as outmoded as the haircuts, as are some of the less politically correct jokes – cheap, unfunny gags are made about Haley’s flat chest, Mother’s worryingly low IQ and Gran’s gin addiction.

Still, if you’re the sort of person who obsessively collects recordings of everything you saw on television as a youth, this will sit nicely on your shelf next to your Mooncat, Play Away and Cockleshell Bay DVD box sets.

For the rest of us, I feel that Metal Mickey is best left as one of television history’s less funny footnotes.