Max Headroom: 'We have better miracles'

What the fuck was Max Headroom?

Back before the internet cam along and gave us the sum total of human knowledge on our phones, you couldn't just check wikipedia. It took a while to find out about stuff, and sometimes it didn't always make sense, and trying to understand what the hell was going on with Max Headroom was so fucking hard. 

He was an AI music presenter, but there was also some kind of grungy science fiction TV show staring the real guy as well as his pixelated alter-ego. There were weird stories of him invading episodes of Doctor Who on PBS that I'd read about in Who fanzines, he was suddenly selling soft drink and burgers between A-Team reruns, and there were lots of weird jokes about it in comics and magazines that I didn't understand.

All this was before I actually saw any of the TV shows they built around Max, but that mass exposure - with the edge of an urban legend - combined with how fucking weird and funny Max was when you actually saw him talking. That strange plastic face, stuttering in digital

The school library had the storybook for the first pilot, the British one, and that didn't help matters, because it was a slightly different version of the one that launched the short-lived American TV series a couple of years later, and that just added to the confusion about what was real and what wasn't.

Which is good, because that's a central tenant to early cyberpunk, and this is where I had my first exposure to the idea, as soft as it was in the TV shows. There were computer networks and digital graphics, but there was also was something gross about the whole concept, with everything dripping in grungy slime, and TV blipverts that could literally make you explode (anybody who doesn't have a deep fear of spontaneous human combustion did not grow up in the 1980s).

It took me years to figure out that Max Headroom, the first great CGI character wasn't even CGI, it was just the immortal Matt Frewer under a shittonne of latex and shot under bad lighting. The whole idea behind Max was that he was this computer character, and even that wasn't real. That made as much sense as anything in Max Headroom's world.