Max Headroom
by K.M. Whitehouse
A CULT ICON OF THE 1980s
Max Headroom was a television personality who presented his own series in the United Kingdom entitled The Max Headroom Show on Channel Four from 1985
to 1987. He was very different from other presenters of the time, as he
was the first to be computer generated. The reason for this was due to
a nasty incident involving a television reporter called Edison Carter, a motorcycle and a car park barrier arm. Those events were made into a television film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future and aired a few days before the start of his series.
When his series first
went out in 1985, the show was a pop music video & chat show,
although Max himself preferred classical music and on occasion urged
his viewers to search for old videos of Mozart. But it wasn’t his
personal choice in music that made Max Headroom a huge star, it was his
infamous stutter that could have gone head to head with Paul
Hardcastle’s hit 19 in a stuttering competition. There were
other characteristics that made him a star however, a passionate love
of golf, being rude to some of his guests, his witty sense of humour
and classic tips to his viewers on how they should try to attempt to
look cool. But there was even more to Max Headroom than those
qualities, there was his egotistical behaviour that resulted in insults
directly being made at his then producer Tim. A bitter rift between the
two of them developed which peaked on one of his shows when he wanted
to talk about the game of gold and Severiano Ballesteros but was cut
off by Tim. Later Max managed to sneak in a video about how golf balls
were made before the producer eventually replaced it with a music
video. After that show Tim was never heard of again. In his book Max Headroom’s Guide To Life, Max said this of his ex-producer “We
had an understanding that went beyond words – basically because we
never spoke. And after trying to throw his weight around – all five
stone of it – for weeks on end, he finally left the studio in a blazing
temper. (I think one of the stage hands set fire to his anorak).”
Max Headroom had become so famous in the United Kingdom that he appeared as a guest on the BBC1 chat show Wogan before going into print with two books, the aforementioned Max Headroom’s Guide To Life and Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future.
The public couldn’t get enough of the computer generated television
presenter and a video of his television movie was released on a VHS
videocassette along with a video game based on the movie. He even found
time to star in a number of television commercials for Radio Rentals.
Max Headroom had hit the big time, and he knew it.
In 1986 Max went to
the United States to star in a long running ad campaign for Coca-Cola
and became Britain’s biggest export of 1986. After returning to the UK
Max teamed up with the Art of Noise and climbed the British singles
charts with the smash hit Paranoimia. He had now become a pop
star too and also starred in the video for the single. Once again the
star visited the USA to appear on Tonight With David Letterman prior to the second season of The Max Headroom Show being transmitted there. Max returned home to release his new single Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You’re A Lovely Guy) taken from his Christmas special Max Headroom’s Giant Christmas Turkey.
1987 saw Max Headroom star in the critically acclaimed science fiction television series entitled Max Headroom in
the USA. The series was based on his 1985 pilot story and lasted for
just fourteen episodes before the series was cancelled. Max bounced
back with The Original Max Talking Headroom Show. Max Headroom was never heard of again except for a one-off appearance on the BBC’s Comic Relief in 1989.
It appeared that Max
Headroom had gone offline forever until late November/December 2007
when he starred in a series of advertisements promoting Channel Four’s
Digital Switchover. Max was a shadow of his former self, old, bald,
twisted and bitter. He flung insults at Channel Four, Jim Carrey,
Anneka Rice, Timmy Mallett and Rick Astley. The ads were repeated in
mid 2008 leaving one question, would Max Headroom ever return to our
screens again?
THE REALITY
Max Headroom was an
English fictional television character created by directors Rocky
Moreton & Annabel Jankel along with writer George Stone and played
by Canadian actor Matt Frewer in prosthetic make-up created by John
Humphreys that took almost five hours to apply. There were no computer
graphics involved at all, even the lines behind Max were hand drawn
line animations. The rest of the trickery was achieved by clever video
editing from Roo Aiken.
The creation of Max
Headroom was an idea that had been around since 1982 when Andy Park was
the commissioning editor for music at Channel Four Television. He
wanted to show music videos on television but felt frustrated, as there
were no formats for them to be shown. He then contacted Peter Wagg,
then head of videos at Chrysalis Records. He told Park that Chrysalis
Visual Programming wanted to produce a music video series for Channel
Four which led to Wagg contacting Rocky Moreton & Annabel Jankel to
discuss how to format and develop such a series. The project was then
discussed with George Stone. They came up with various ideas how to
link the videos using graphics along with other ideas using visuals but
non of the ideas worked. What was needed was a presenter, not a normal
presenter, but a self-egotistical computer generated one. It was then
that Stone came up with the idea of The Max Headroom Show. Once
the format of the show was devised, Stone left the project and work
began on a disturbing screenplay by Steve Roberts based on an idea by
Stone, Moreton & Jankel of how Max Headroom came to be. Prior to
the first episode of The Max Headroom Show, the pilot film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future,
was transmitted. It starred Matt Frewer as Edison Carter, an ace
television reporter who stumbled across lethal three second
advertisements called Blipverts that caused some viewers to explode. The Blipverts
were made and being broadcast by Network 23 - the very television
station that Carter worked for. After his discovery of a videocassette
showing such an incident, he is hunted down by the network leading to a
motorcycle incident where Carter’s head impacted with a barrier arm
reading Max Headroom 2.3m. His mind was then copied onto a computer so
that Carter’s reports could still keep being made.
The pilot episode was a huge hit for Channel Four. The Max Headroom Show was
also a huge success so much so that the original idea of Max Headroom
just being a link between videos saw him start to interview the likes
of Sting, Roger Daltrey, Simon Le Bon & Nick Rhodes and Boy
George. He had become more popular than the videos a thing that took
everyone involved in the show by surprise. After the end of the first
series, Max Headroom’s dialogue writers Paul Owen & David Hansen
wrote the book Max Headroom’s Guide To Life based upon Max’s
tips throughout the series. The book was the first in a successful
range of Max Headroom merchandise that also included a video, a
computer game, t-shirts and posters.
Before Rocky Moreton
& Annabel Jankel left to do other projects, they directed a series
of Max Headroom television advertisements for the Radio Rentals chain.
In addition to the commercials Radio Rentals shop windows were also
decorated with Max Headroom promotional displays throughout the chain.
Max Headroom had now become a successful advertising tool which was
taken to its conclusion in the United States where Coca-Cola and Pepsi
were both interested in using Max to front their advertisements. The
two corporations became aware of the presenter after a special extended
version of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future and six specially compiled episodes of The Max Headroom Show
were broadcast there on the subscription cable channel Cinemax. Once
again Coca-Cola won another battle of the “cola war”. This led to over
twenty Coca-Cola Catch The Wave and New Coke commercials being made between 1986-87 and led to whole range of Max Headroom merchandise being made available in the USA.
The new format for the second season of The Max Headroom Show
was to show only excerpts from the music videos to show more of Max and
interview a wider range of guest stars from Michael Caine to Jackie
Collins. Another addition to the show was a new theme tune composed,
performed & produced by the Art of Noise which led to Max appearing
on their record Paranoimia. Because Max had become so huge in the USA a decision was made to air the second season of The Max Headroom Show there first on Cinemax instead of the Channel Four in the UK. This resulted in the Christmas special entitled Max Headroom’s Giant Christmas Turkey
being aired first before the second season in the UK. To accompany the
Christmas show, Max released his own debut single called Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You’re A Lovely Guy) but it failed to enter the charts.
Chrysalis/Lakeside
were commissioned by ABC to produce a science fiction television series
in association with Lorimar-Telepictures called Max Headroom based upon the adventures of Edison Carter. The original pilot Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future was remade, entitled Blipverts,
again written by Steve Roberts with a new ending to allow the rest of
the series to follow. In addition to that Roberts also wrote several
other key episodes including Body Banks which dealt with two killers from the original movie,
selling human spare parts to a body bank . At the helm of the series
was Peter Wagg. Only Matt Frewer as Edison Carter/Max Headroom, Amanda
Pays as Theora Jones and William Morgan Sheppard as Blank Reg reprised
their roles as everyone else were recast and played by American actors
as the series was being made for American audiences. The series was
groundbreaking in that it satirically dealt with the way that
television networks behave as well as everybody being watched by the
powers that be in an Orwellian society but because it was based on
Edison Carter, Max Headroom became nothing more than a background
character.
It is ironic that in a season two episode of Max Headroom, a line of dialogue is heard by a Network 23 announcer saying “The Max Headroom Show has been cancelled”. Not long after that episode was made, Max Headroom was cancelled by ABC. Chrysalis Visual Programming then produced another made for the USA series, The Original Max Talking Headroom Show for Cinemax. It was a reformatted version of The Max Headroom Show
without any music videos except for episode one. It only ran for six
episodes and lacked the charm of the original two seasons. It bore
little resemblance to the original format of the groundbreaking
entertainment show that made Max Headroom into the 1980s icon that he
became. Max Headroom’s Coca-Cola commercials also ended after New Coke became a huge commercial failure as the public hated the new drink.
After
Lorimar-Telepictures was purchased by Warner Bros. in 1988 there have
been legal issues about who actually owned the rights to Max Headroom,
this has prevented the release of any Max Headroom productions and
video & DVD releases. Since 2005 All3Media purchased the rights
from Warner Bros. A DVD of Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future
has been released in Japan under license. This has enabled Max Headroom
to return in a new series of advertisements promoting Channel Four’s Digital Switchover
campaign that saw Matt Frewer return to the role he is most famous for
and the return of co-creator Rocky Moreton directing the commercials.
In the spirit of Max
Headroom’s return home to British television Channel Four released a
fun statement telling all of his fans why he hadn’t been on television
for twenty years. It can be viewed at:
© Copyright KM Whitehouse 2008
