Those scientists had better get a shift on. By my reckoning they’ve got three more years to invent automatic shoe-laces, flying cars and, most importantly, the hoverboard. That’s what we were led to expect by Back to the Future II, set in 2015. And if that’s not the future that’s delivered, there’s a whole generation of Michael J Fox fans that are going to be mighty disappointed.

As things stand, Marty McFly could be forgiven a strong sense of anticlimax were he to time-travel forward 30 years in his souped-up DeLorean to find everything is more or less as he left it in 1985. Slightly better clothes, perhaps. Significantly better hair. But on the whole, and with the honourable exception of a few Apple products, it's the same old, same old.