Looks like it’s the end of my affair with sci-fi transport

The fall from grace of the e-scooter is just the latest in a long line of disappointments for jetpack fan Aidan Smith

In the PR departments of e-scooter manufacturers, I wonder what they’re thinking right now. It might be: “Thanks, Dominic West, we couldn’t have bought that kind of publicity.” Then again it could be: “You bloody idiot!”

Last week the actor was photographed just about everywhere. Best-known for The Affair – in which he plays a married father of four children who falls for a younger, dark-haired woman with a sultry, downturned mouth – married dad-to-four West was with the younger, dark-haired Lily James and her sultry, downturned mouth.

In Rome, they were snapped canoodling in a restaurant followed by a church. Then came the money shot, or not as the case may be: the pair on an e-scooter, whizzing round some of the great sights of the Eternal City.

So is West, then, the irresistible embodiment of sex and technology, a title inherited from James Bond who regrettably has gone PC? Or, given the ridicule for his dirty-oldman act, the ridicule for the clunky display of togetherness back home with his wife, a smirk from him that even Leslie Phillips at his most bounderish would have rejected as too cringesome, to say nothing of the sympathy felt for poor Mrs West, has he just killed the cool quotient of this mode of transport stone dead?

It’s the latter, I’m afraid, and what a disastrous year it’s been for futuristic A-to-b devices.

In March the first death of a pedestrian hit by an e -bike on a British road reached the cour ts. Sakine Cihan suffered a “catastrophic” head injur y when she was struck by the machine in London. Bricklayer Thomas Hanlon, although travelling 10mph over the 20mph speed limit, was cleared of causing her death by careless driving. In June the S egway came to a crunching halt for good. The chunky upright t wo -wheeled transpor ters had launched at the turn of the centur y promising to revolutionise how we got around, but despite being popular with tourists and police they never managed to shake off their intrinsic comedy value, something exploited in a number of movies.

There were high-profile crashes. George W. Bush tumbled off his S egway and a cameraman riding one at an athletics meeting ran over Usain B olt. In 2009, British self-made millionaire Jimi Heselden, who’d recently bought the company which manufactured S egways, died when he toppled over a 30ft cliff.

Then in August Simon Cowell, who’d splashed out on seven e-bikes when that fad began, broke his back testing his newest £30,000 model. Still recovering, and having come just millimetres away from being paralysed, the light entertainment svengali has tweeted: “Some good advice: if you buy an electric bike, read the manual before riding it.”

If you’re a Child of the Space Race like me, all of this is rather disillusioning. I put in long hours in front of fuzzy black-and-white television trying to make out the astronauts as they clodhopped on the Moon. I put in even longer ones waiting for their capsules to splash down in the briny ocean. I watched every edition of Tomorrow’s World, loving all its gadgets and logging all its predictions. I even got excited by K-tel’s ads for the Record Selector and the Mood Shirt (“It changes colour to match how you feel!”). In return for all that I was expecting my jetpack to arrive at any moment and for the future to properly take off.