Cult TV Blog

 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...

Hi there, televisionists! I vaguely remembered Max doing some adverts for Radio Rentals (the appliance hire firm) in the eighties, and was delighted to find that this is how he greets the viewers on one of them.  Despite my avoiding his advertising in my previous post, it is strangely suitable that I at least touch on it in this post on Blipverts. Blipverts is of course the first episode of the 1987 to 1988 ABC US series simply called Max Headroom. It's coming at this point because I've previously written a post just about Twenty Minutes into the Future, which originally created a back story for Max, and this episode rather covers the same ground so is by way of another introduction to his back story. The titular blipverts are a system of very short adverts that get into people's subconscious discovered and run by Channel 23.  I actually think this episode is in some ways a better introduction to Max's history than Twenty Minutes into the Future, at least in narrative t...

As sometimes happens the posts on this blog haven't faithfully been representing what TV I've been watching lately (I get caught in a conflict between that aspiration which would make the blog more accurately reflect the lapfrog nature of my inner world and the opposite aspiration to write constructively and in an orderly manner and try to concentrate on things), and this post is an attempt to remedy this. I actually got distracted by Virtual Murder and what has most been at the forefront of my attention lately has been the various TV incarnations of Max Headroom. This post is purely intended to chat about them a bit and try to disentangle them, and then I'll write some blogs about different episodes of the various TV shows. I loooved the eighties, I think because I was at the exact right age to appreciate the good sides of it without being too deflated by the incredible greed and other terrible things that were going on. For that reason the 1980s shows that have appeared h...

I never thought I would be writing about this TV movie made by Channel 4 in the eighties. Not because it is actually lost (although you will read it is lost on the internet) but because I couldn't remember its name! I never saw it the first time round but had the book of the film. The book was simply called Max Headroom so I didn't know the real name of the film and it's taken until now for me to think of just the right thing to Google to find it. To steal a useful summary from a review of the book I had: Max Headroom was, arguably, the first forced meme before the existence of the internet. The wisecracking, glitchy proto-computer-generated talking head was saturation bombed on the public from 1985 to 1988 in a way that would guarantee subsequent apathy, mockery and derision -- meant to be a symbol of rebellion and edginess while at the same time made a mascot for the ultimate in normie shilldom, as an ad man for Coca-Cola. His guilt-by-association tie to a failed product,...