Remember last time when I asked you if anyone remembered Max Headroom?
While Max may have been one of the most lovable phenomena of the 80’s cyberpunk movement, a certain incident that occurred in 1987 may have made Max Headroom into an immortal legend. The Wikipedia holds a neat digest of that day.
The Max Headroom character originated in 1985 as an announcer for a music video programme on the British television channel, Channel 4, called The Max Talking Headroom Show. The intent was to portray a futuristic computer-generated character. Max Headroom appeared as a stylized head on TV against harsh primary color rotating-line backgrounds, and he became well known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, wisecracks, and malapropisms (”Like they say when you’re buying suppositories, ‘With friends like that, who needs enemas?’”).
The incident of which I would like to remind you of (or educate you with if you weren’t around to witness it yourself), is the Max Headroom Pirating Incident. For convenience I’ll quote the wikipedia article as it neatly summarizes the events of that day.
The first occurrence of the signal hijack took place during WGN-TV’s News at Nine. During Bears highlights in the sports report, the station’s signal was interrupted by a video of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask, standing or sitting in front of a swaying sheet of corrugated metal imitating the background effect in the Max Headroom New Coke commercial. There was no audio. The hijack was stopped after 20 seconds when WGN switched the modulation of their studio link to the John Hancock Center transmitter.
The incident left sports reporter Dan Roan flustered, saying, “Well, if you’re wondering what happened, so am I.”
Later that night, around 11:15 p.m., during a broadcast of the Doctor Who episode “Horror of Fang Rock“, PBS station WTTW’s signal was hijacked using the same video that was broadcast during the WGN-TV hijack, this time with garbled audio. The person in the Max Headroom mask appeared, as before, this time saying, “That does it. He’s a freakin’ nerd,” before laughing and jeering, “Yeah, I think I’m better than Chuck Swirsky. Freakin’ liberal.”
The pirate continued to utter random phrases, including New Coke’s advertising slogan “Catch the Wave” while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coke spokesperson at the time), saying “Your love is fading”, humming the theme song to Clutch Cargo, and stating that he had “made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds” (the call letters WGN are an abbreviation for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”, in reference to the Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune). He then held up a glove, said “my brother is wearing the other one”, and put the glove on. He then took the glove off, adding that it was “dirty.”
The picture suddenly cut over to a shot of the hijacker with his buttocks exposed, being spanked with a flyswatter by an unidentified accomplice wearing a dress. The hijacker screamed and exclaimed, “They’re coming to get me!” and “Come get me, bitch!”
The transmission then blacked out and cut off, and the hijack was over after about 90 seconds.
WTTW, which maintains its transmitter atop the Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker because at the time there were no engineers on duty at the Sears Tower. Also, the station’s master control center was unable to contact its transmitting equipment remotely to switch the studio-transmitter link, unlike their counterparts at WGN-TV, who were able to thwart the intruder by switching their John Hancock Center studio/transmitter link remotely within seconds. According to a WBBM-TV employee, the video pirate had attempted to break in on several other Chicago TV stations, however these attempts were unsuccessful.
The Max Headroom incident made national headlines and was reported on the CBS Evening News the next day.
WTTW and WGN-TV join HBO as victims of broadcast signal intrusion. There has not been a verified broadcast intrusion incident of this kind in America since, although almost twenty years after this incident, Australia and the Czech Republic had similar occurrences of broadcast intrusion.
Below you can find two videos of the incident. The first one shows the new report of the hijacking and the second one shows the actual hijacking in original format.
Another nice source for this story can be found here. The site shows a few articles that originally reported on the incident and digs a bit into the events that happened that day. The article is from 1987. I always find it strangely nostalgic to read stuff like that. Almost as nice as watching old Computer Chronicle recordings.
