Club haunted by ghost of Max Headroom

A riot of pinstripes

Our February meeting was technically both challenging and exciting, as our speaker was actually located in Arkansas, several thousand miles away from the meeting itself in the Bishop's Finger pub in Smithfield. But Lainie Petersen is no stranger to podcasting and she delivered her talk via Streamyard and it was projected on to our huge projector screen in the pub, while those who could not make the meeting (myself included) could tune in from home. The talk itself concerned the “Max Headroom Incident” of 1987, in which unknown persons somehow hacked into a TV broadcast in the Chicago area and replaced the scheduled programming with images of a man in a Max Headroom mask and costume, occasionally joined by a woman in a dirndl who spanked him with a fly swatter. (For the benefit of younger viewers, Max Headroom had his own satirical TV show in the Eighties, billing him as the the world's first computer-generated TV personality, although in fact he was played by actor Matt Frewer, wearing prosthetics and a plastic suit to give the illusion of low-quality video rendering.) Although the perpetrators have never been identified, Lainie spend much of the talk considering the evidence of who did it and how (and why) it was done. You can see a video of the talk on our YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/live/KhjunKyixc8. You can see more photos from the evening on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720332258310.

Many thanks to Lainie and also to Stuart Mitchell, who handled the tech at the London end and also took these still photos.