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See more awards ». Known For. Watchmen Moloch. Hercules Panic. Dawn of the Dead Frank. Show all Hide all Show by Hide Show Actor credits. Judge Fred Wright. The Binder. Show all 6 episodes. Peter Morton. Show all 7 episodes. The Bishop voice, credit only. The Bishop voice. Show all 12 episodes. Reverend Kellergan.
Show all 10 episodes. Carnage voice, uncredited. Aldous Leekie - Gag or Throttle Aldous Leekie. Show all 11 episodes. Anthony Bruhl. Paul Rice. Albert Kirschner - Fatherland Albert Kirschner. Christiansen - Working Late a Lot Paris Shoes Williamson voice, uncredited. Arthur Bowden National Security Advisor.
General Bressler. Jim Taggart. Show all 18 episodes. Sid Noonan. Green - Two Minutes to Midnight This debuted on Channel 4 and was a legit hit doubling the ratings of what was normally in its time slot. It ran for 3 seasons and would include celebrity interviews and a studio audience. The second and third seasons were actually shown in the U.
S by those old rascals at Cinemax. The Max Headroom show finished in England in but Cinemax would create a fourth season on its own made up of seven episodes. These were never shown on British TV, however.
This whole thing has jumped around between years and countries. The Max Headroom series was shown in the U. S and would last for two seasons in mid and late It was a spinoff of from that original movie and was an actual dramatic TV series. These were short series and I vaguely remember them. I swear they were on Sunday nights here and it would have been the only exposure I would have had to Max Headroom.
Teenagers or adults? Was it for kids or did they even know who they wanted to target? Even though it was short lived they also put out two more episodes in Either way, Max Headroom was on the radar. They decided to relaunch Coke but with a whole new sweeter flavor.
Some say this was a way to start using high fructose corn syrup, some say it was to compete with the flavor of diet drinks but they ended up changing it. They might have liked it if it was a separate product but it had totally replaced normal Coke. Some say this was their intention all along to create a renewed interest in an old product but who really knows.
Anyway, one of the big commercial campaigns would involve Max Headroom. With New Coke, they were trying to create a new hipper image so the young whippersnappers would be all over it. They just encouraged me to riff around, and it seemed like more of a weatherman or a newsman or something. And he just is Max Headroom, even from his audition tape; he's perfect. Image courtesy of John Humphreys.
It didn't take too long for us to realize that we had to fake this, because what we wanted was years down the line. Then I tried a hand puppet. I remember I suddenly said to Annabel, "The face. The human face. Matt Frewer ACTOR I gradually realized what I was getting into as plaster of paris head molds were made, and this prosthetics rubber make-up business goo was happening. You suddenly realize that it's going to be a pretty arduous process creating the look for Max. They just wanted Matt Frewer to look like a computer-generated TV presenter.
You got to remember, in those days, what does a computer-generated person actually look like? There was nothing there. So we made a fairly simple make-up really, we just changed his features a little bit, as if the computer generation hadn't quite got it right. But we wanted to keep as near to Matt Frewer as possible because he's a great actor. He's very animated, very expressive, so you don't want to hide all of that. There was the tuxedo suit, there was a sort of golf suit, and then there was a white tuxedo — all equally cumbersome, and they went right down to your elbows, and you couldn't move around.
But in a way, you compensate, and it becomes even more computer-generated [looking], because you're sort of rocking back and forth to make up for the gestures that you can do with your arms or your feet or whatever. So you end up looking like this sort of jack in the box, squirming around.
The TV gods giveth, and they taketh away. And what they tooketh away, I added. And in this commercial, we had these moving, very primitive-looking CGI linear backgrounds. What I basically did was stole that from the commercial, and just put it behind Max. I remember this day particularly; oh my god, were we relieved. We put him against blue screen, we lit him dramatically, with this one light source from one side, and we rotated him Production on 20 Minutes into the Future got underway with Steve Roberts as the sole writer.
Once we scouted that, we realized we had this perfect environment. You couldn't build that production design, and certainly in those days, we didn't have the funds to actually computer-generate anything. There was Blade Runner , there was Brazil. There [were] a lot of dystopian landscapes out there. And it was post-punk as well, remember, and it was still post-war. London was pretty desolate then.
We had the Thursday night slot, which was Channel 4's movie-of-the-week slot, and the half-hour [episode on Saturday]. The way we started the half-hour [music video] show, there were no opening titles. There were no credits for anybody. When it came to , it was just that satellite chssssssss , snow and buzz.
And all of a sudden, Max was there. Like, bang! And he's talking in German, and he's telling this joke about lederhosen all in German, he's roaring with laughter during the whole thing, and then the first music video we played was a German music video. We had no idea what the first commercial would be, but it already got the Max Headroom award for the worst commercial of the week.
Then at the end, it just went chssssssss and to [static] again. It was like you'd woken up in Eastern Europe and turned the television on, and you're watching some weird station that you don't understand, and then it suddenly is cut off and gone.
I started to do this kind of stuttering effect on video — we were just looping. Everybody was, like, "Okay, Rocky. We got to take it so far that, like, the computer is jammed in this kind of… In this freeze motion. We'd doubled ratings within three weeks. We were renewed three weeks into the run. And anybody above that age was just completely confused.
It was amazing, you know. It was a genuine phenomenon in its time. A few wobbly lines. And they refused to enter us in the make-up [category] because they didn't want anyone to know it was make-up. I'm trying to remember how long the make-up took. Probably four hours of make-up? When you get into the swing of it, we probably got it down to three hours or so in the end. They were very painful to wear, and I ended up with severely lacerated corneas.
I don't know if you've ever had a lacerated cornea, but it's the worst pain I think I've ever felt. I was popping painkillers, and it just wasn't working.
So on the last show, we decided to do Max interviewing somebody. I called around to all my mates at the record labels and said, "What albums are you releasing around the air date that we had? It sort of became the rite of passage for various pop stars and film stars to come on and shill their latest project.
But in turn they would get roasted by Max. With two books, trading cards, and a legion of other merchandised tie-ins, Max was everywhere — and every single item was copyright Chrysalis Visual Media. Around the same time, Coca-Cola was looking for help as a reformulation of its flagship product, dubbed New Coke, was flailing. So he stuck the tape in his bag, and didn't tell anybody. We did three years with Coke. For Cinemax, it was like the biggest thing that had ever happened, that a character that was on Cinemax was on national television as the spokesperson for Coca-Cola.
We just couldn't believe our luck at that point. At the end of it, apparently he started phoning around and found out who the hell had made it and where they were. And the next morning we were invited to go and see him. Like New Coke, they needed to make statements, and they needed to try and do something a bit more dramatic to make a sea change.
I went to see NBC, and to my great surprise they passed on the whole thing; I went to CBS, and they ended up offering me a movie of the week. Then I met with Stu, and all I got out of Stu was a pilot and six-script order. But again, I thought let's back a guy I believe in, who's gonna champion the show on our behalf inside the network, and they need us more than we need them.
That seemed like a good combination to me. Max crossed the Atlantic, evolving from a niche cable character to a full-blown, mainstream global phenomenon.
But as the franchise developed, the remaining two members of the creative team that dreamed him up — Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton — were left behind. You know, somebody that they could parade around that would toe the corporate line. All sorts of heavy hitters got involved. Ridley Scott had got himself involved. ABC, Chrysalis, the record company — and it all kind of blew out of all proportion.
We tried to form a company with Matt Frewer to wrest control away from the producer, but then backdoor negotiations started to happen. We lost control, and it was costing us more and more money in lawyers' fees. By the time it got to America, they made a fortune because they made this whole TV series without us.
And they took our "Created by" credit away on the American series. He simply went back to the original movie. I remember passing his office; there was a video player with 20 Minutes into the Future on the screen. It was kind of reverse engineering the original movie. During that time, Waggie said, "You know, they're asking me [to] provide a sample of what we would do as a second episode. So I vanished back to the hotel and spent two and a half days basically on room service and bottles of various encouraging fluids, and knocked out this page script.
And I get a phone call from Peter Wagg saying, "Well, they've just ordered a series of 13, mate. You're going to have to stay. This is in December. You have zero data to start planning ahead with. But we had the English pilot to copy. And the conceptual work was fabulous.
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