Perhaps this is a case only a Time Lord can solve.The Max Headroom Hijacking Incident was a television signal hijacking that occurred in Chicago, Illinois, United States on the evening of November 22, 1987. Loyal Doctor Who lovers were taping the show at the time. Fair warning - it does containg some foul language and bare buttocks. You can watch the WTTW footage on YouTube. To this day, the perpetrators remain anonymous. Yet, the television pirates were never caught. The FCC engineer declared that the people responsible could face up to a $10,000 fine, a year in prison - or both. The Chicago incident made national headlines. Only static could be heard, which is somehow more disturbing.
Headroom did not speak in that first interruption. Earlier that evening, this prankster had hacked into another station, when he suddenly popped up during NFL highlights in WGN-TV's Nine O'Clock News. The same can probably not be said for Chicago Bears fans. Undoubtedly, fans of Doctor Who were aware of, if not fans of Max Headroom. A TV series for ABC followed in early 1987. Matt Frewer performed the character under prosthetic makeup, and admitted that Ted Baxter of The Mary Tyler Moore Show inspired his performance. The stuttering, hip pseudo-computer-generated character had first appeared in a 1985 British cyberpunk movie, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into The Future. To be honest, if any television audience was going to be amused by such a prank, it would this one. The pirate broadcast continued for a little over a minute, entering vulgar territory when this "Max" dropped his trousers and got spanked with a fly swatter. The real Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesman. He - presuming it was a he under the rubber - declared that local sports broadcaster Chuck Swirsky was a "fricking liberal." The phony Headroom then held up a can of Pepsi and muttered, "Catch the wave!" which just so happened to be the slogan for New Coke. With crackling audio and radio distortion, this unsanctioned Max Headroom spewed a series of strange statements.
A person disguised under a Max Headroom Halloween mask hijacked the WTTW PBS airwaves. However, on the evening of November 22, 1987, at 11:15 p.m., Whovians viewing Doctor Who in the Chicago area were puzzled by a strange and unsettling broadcast intrusion. Aliens, robot dogs, giant maggots, curly-haired men with scarves traveling through time in a police box - nothing was off limits in the strange world of the classic British sci-fi show. Regular viewers of Doctor Who are quite used to witnessing strange phenomena. Image: The Museum of Classic Chicago Television
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