The Max Headroom Show 3 of 5

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 This is about an episode of the original UK show called The Max Headroom Show, broadcast 1985 to 1987. You can see it at https://youtu.be/2JLpKbMlcSU. Unfortunately for music copyright reasons it's not complete but is nonetheless an excellent monument to eighties culture and cult TV.

As I commented, you can tell how cult a TV show is by how much TV archaeology you have to do to find out about it and I've had to dig quite deep to work out more or less where this episode came and have been unable to identify it exactly. It is not a series 1 episode because they're missing, and it isn't a series 3 episode because they had studio audiences so it must be from series 2, broadcast in the UK July to August 1986. I am indebted to maxheadroom.com for the information that the episodes 2.2 (broadcast 29th July 1986), 2.5 (12th August 1986) and 2.6 (19th August 1986) had no guests so this must be one of them. Some kind soul has ripped it from the Betamax tape it was recorded on and called it number 3 out of the 5 he's uploaded.

These five episodes are (almost) the only way we'll currently get an idea of what this show was and I just think popularity and commercialism are overrated. The only other survival of this show is a selection of quotes from Max from series 1 (which is otherwise missing believed wiped):


We go straight into Max stuttering briefly before the first piece of music which is by an absolute legend and great heroine of mine. I want to end the blog post with this great classic so I'm not going to talk about it further here.

The successive musical numbers with Max commenting in between are

Peter Gabriel: I Don't Remember

Bauhaus: Ziggy Stardust

Here Supertramp's It's Raining Again was removed for copyright reasons.

Black Lace: Agadoo (No, really lol)

Bryan Adams: Heaven

Paul Hardcastle: 19

Because this is a home recording it includes some contemporary adverts for Wall's Feast, Hofmeister Lager, Out Now (a hits compilation) which bring back some memories for me. This is how I found you can still get Wall's Feast, I used to love them although I haven't had one for years. These ads give a different feel to this recording than any commercial release could achieve.

I don't have any criticism, you either are going to like this for its mixture of Max and other eighties cultural icons, or you aren't. 

Personally I think it's great, and I agree with the verdict at the time that the music was well selected and gave airtime to some excellent acts who otherwise wouldn't have become as known.

Oh, the piece of music by my heroine that started the show? It was this one. I feel like most TV shows wouldn't start with Divine these days or at any other time before or after the eighties!


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