Okay so, full disclosure, this one is partly included on the list because the accompanying video still freaks us out. The official Max Headroom was pretty strange on his own; created for a TV movies and spun off into presenting his own music show, the character was supposedly the world's first AI television host, actually played by an actor with a stutter and weird make-up to make him look all plastic-y and artificial. So what could be creepier than that? Well, if somebody interrupted the Nine O'Clock News wearing a cheap facsimile of Max's face, talking in a distorted voice and generally messing with your head. It was a regular evening in Chicago. People were settling down to watch highlights of the day's Cubs game. Suddenly, the baseball was replaced with the flickering, wobbling image of a guy in a weird mask talking nonsense in a high-pitched voice. A few seconds later, it disappeared, much to the confusion of the news anchors. Later that night, an old episode of Doctor Who was hijacked on PBS with the weird guy again, this time blathering on about Coke and then getting spanked with a fly swatter. If that sounds like something out of a David Lynch film, well, you're not far off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cycVTXtm0U0 To date - over twenty years later - the perpetrators of the hijacking have never been found or identified themselves. It was probably just some punk kids who knew how to jam TV signals, but still. Very weird, and weirdly disturbing.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
