The Max Headroom Incident

Our speaker was long-standing US member Lainie Petersen, who delivered a talk about the hijacking of the television signals of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, on November 22, 1987, briefly sending a pirate broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume to thousands of home viewers. (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.) The talk runs for the first 21 minutes, after which we managed to splice in a live feed from our meeting happening in a London pub, so that people in the room could ask Lainie questions, which worked remarkably well.