The program basically re-cooked and expanded upon the chat-show element of the 1985 Max Headroom Show and was a water-cooler hit, with Frewer more than up to the task of parrying wits with his sharper guests, despite the huge burden of prosthetic make-up and ‘live’ video-jitter. There were more adventures in store for Max, Edison Carter and his sexy sidekick Theora Jones – played by Amanda Pays – but first Frewer’s now hugely popular character returned to its pop-culture roots with The Original Max Talking Headroom Show, where the cheeky frontman brought his highly imitable brand of barbed wit to the task of interviewing guests that included Bob Geldof, Rutger Hauer and Tina Turner. The ersatz showman’s wit and dubious wisdom was far more appreciated than the music videos he was often critical of in his link slots.
That species of jerky video now familiar in the low-bandwidth world of mobile phone-quality moving pictures, combined with the appearance of synthetic latency in some (then impossible) real-time rendering system to give the illusion that the prosthetised Frewer was nothing more than pixels and algorithms, and The Max Headroom Show was an instant hit. Enter Brit-side Canadian actor Matt Frewer, who aced the auditions for the fake frontman and added his own comic genius to Max’s zippy ripostes and acid putdowns. Videographers Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton and George Stone had sought initially to fill their cutting-edge remit for a ‘talking head’ with real CGI, but the state of the art was at such a poor stage in 1984 – as YouTubing ‘Money For Nothing’ will reveal – that such an approach was patently not going to work.
Pretty much about the time that Bonnie Tyler was disagreeing with Tina Turner about whether or not we need another hero (the mid-eighties), perhaps the unlikeliest idol ever stepped forward to effortlessly claim the role with vacuum-formed hair, cemetery teeth, no existence below the shoulders and a speech impediment that was halfway between a blown fuse and a Malcolm McLaren scratch track, the nonetheless personality-laden Max Headroom began his cyber-evangelisation as a music host on Channel 4 in the UK.
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