UK TV

Never, in the history of music videos, has so much effort been devoted to giving one VJ a back-story as with Max Headroom.

Picture this: it’s 1985. Music videos are big, especially thanks to the relatively shiny and new channel MTV (music television). Computers and computer graphics are also big, thanks to the Apple Mac, arcade games and movies like Tron and The Last Starfighter. So what more natural blend of coolness could there be than a computer-generated VJ?

Unfortunately, computer graphics weren’t quite up to the job back then, so Canadian actor Matt Frewer got slathered in prosthetics and make-up to become the world’s computer-generated VJ, ‘Max Headroom’, a stuttering, witty, seemingly plastic American ‘shockjock’. And he was very popular. You can still see his influence in Back To The Future 2.

But the arrival of Max Headroom for some reason required an answer to the question, "Who is Max Headroom and where does he come from?"

Bizarrely, the answer was supplied by Channel 4, who decided to cash in on a literary and movie phenomenon, ‘cyberpunk’, to create an origin movie for Max Headroom that was set ’20 minutes into the future’. Surprisingly, it was bloody good, and even more surprisingly, despite its inauspicious British origins, it launched two seasons of one of the most innovative and satirical TV sci-fi shows British and US TV has ever seen.

Here’s the start of the British movie:

Continue reading “Lost Gems: Max Headroom (1985-1988)”