The Fifties had The Rocker. The Sixties had The Hippie. The Eighties had The Goth. And the Noughties have The Geek. The download has not been easy though – there were technical difficulties, incompatible files and wrong regions. Now, though, The Geek is permanently on our hard drive – let’s face it, we love geeks.

‘Loving’ geeks is not just about tolerating their diminutive, muscle-free frames and allowing them to hang out with us. Geek love is about wanting to lick their acne-ridden faces and kneel before their joysticks in sexual ecstasy at the prospect of becoming the subject of their undivided attention, even if it is just for the length of the advert break.

Geeks are not just good, geeks are gods. The meek inheriting the earth, the ultimate twist in the sci-fi movie of evolution, the final episode where the speccy guy wins and the chiselled bully repents or dies, all played out on a floating microclimate headed towards a black hole.

Geekland is Nerdworld’s Greenwich Village – the arty district

What this reflects is a society in which ‘skills’ are no longer considered to be splitting logs and wrestling bears – unless of course you are playing Woodland Copse Carnage III, available only on Nintendo. We are now entering cyber-space: worlds within worlds within worlds created and mastered by men who couldn’t crush a coke can. Bill Gates heralded the dawning of Nerdworld, with him as reigning monarch. Geekland is Nerdworld’s Greenwich Village – the arty district. In Nerdworld, people know how to build computers. In Geekland you are more likely to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of sci-fi, an unhealthy obsession with pop culture and an obscure back catalogue of horror/cult sex films and comics. One or more of the above makes you a geek – all of them and you are a Geek god, a giant among men, a fountain of knowledge, a purveyor of rabid opinion and, these days, a bit of a hot ticket. But it was not always so, and the story begins long ago in a galaxy far, far away.