Let us borrow Professor Peabody’s WayBack Machine and travel back to the strange time known as the 1980s. It was a time when Molly Ringwald, Warrant, and mullets were inexplicably popular, and gave birth to such travesties as the New Coke and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It was truly a bizarre decade.*

Perhaps one of the more peculiar things to become popular during the 1980s was something called Max Headroom. Headroom was created back in 1984 as the “world’s first computer generated television host.” However, as the technology to make such a thing did not exist back in the 1980s, Headroom was just actor Matt Frewer in a prosthetic cap, set against a hand drawn background. Yeah, this was a thing in the 1980s.

Normally, something like Max Headroom would be completely ignored here, but this somehow fondly remembered entity actually has a bit of a history with Doctor Who. Yes, a prosthetic head with a stuttering issue is intertwined with Doctor Who lore. Seriously.

See, back in 1987, during the airing of the ‘Horror of Fang Rock’ serial on WTTW on the 22nd of November, someone wearing a Max Headroom mask hacked into a television broadcast for the second time that day. These hacks would come to be known as the “Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion,” the perpetrators of which were never identified.

On this occasion, the truly bizarre spectacle involved the interloper reciting the catch phrase for New Coke while holding a Pepsi can, flipping off the camera with a large prosthetic in a way that would do Peter Capaldi proud, revealing his buttocks and then getting spanked by another accomplice with a flyswatter as he screamed loudly, among other antics. It was a grave error of judgment indeed.

For all of the memories that the Seventh Doctor provided, that 90 second or so interruption may have been the biggest moment for the Doctor in the Chicago area. Doctor Who, at the time, was just over two years away from being placed on an indefinite hiatus, and support of the series at the BBC had reached rock bottom. Max Headroom may have actually provided one of the more memorable moments over those last few years of Doctor Who.

It could have been worse, I suppose. Instead of Max Headroom being spanked with a flyswatter, the episode could have been interrupted by a broadcast of ‘Pretty in Pink’ or a Stryper concert.

*Views of the writer do not necessarily reflect those of Doctor Who Watch, or other individual writers.