Note: this article was one of two written by me in 2012 for a book on politics in British television science fiction and fantasy which was never published. Originally the article was to have been drafted in collaboration with the editor of the book and a political advisor, however this stage was never reached. I am presenting the article largely as submitted in 2012 with only minor line editing tweaks and to add one reference to the world of 2020.
In 1982, a new television channel began broadcasting in the UK. Channel 4 was established with a remit to provide ‘alternative’ programming – news, comedy, drama. One of the things that the channel wanted to exploit was the rapidly developing music video market, which had seen MTV become a huge sensation in the United States. Andy Park (Commissioning Editor for Music at Channel 4) was keen to promote this art form and (at the suggestion of Chrysalis Records’ head Peter Wagg) worked with music video directors Rocky and Annabel Jankel to decide how this could be done. Between them they decided that the channel’s music programming would require some kind of host. Along with writer George Stone they came up with the idea of Max Headroom – a virtual ‘VJ’ (or ‘Video Jockey’, as opposed to the radio presenters who had taken on the popular title of ‘Disc Jockey’ or ‘DJ’) whose patter would be reminiscent of American broadcasters, and whose sharp suits and slicked back hair would place him firmly in the fashions of the 1980s.
But who was Max? How did he come about? It was decided that rather than simply appearing out of nowhere, Max’s origins should be explored. Initially it was thought that this could be done via a series of ten minute episodes which would add together to tell the story, but it was decided that this was not practical. Instead, the character was introduced in an hour-long drama that was set at an unspecified point in the near future – which has got to be one of the strangest geneses of a dystopian science-fiction drama that I can think of.
Edison Carter is an investigative journalist who flies in to dangerous situations, guided by an operator who accesses CCTV cameras and the plans of buildings and directs him to where he needs to be to get the story, and to where he needs to be to get away from the story when it comes chasing after him. At the beginning of the film, Carter is in a helicopter, filming a link explaining that he is going to investigate an occurrence in a flat block that the police are refusing to discuss. He makes his way to the scene, only to find that a rival network has gotten there first but that the story has been ‘pulled’ – something which Carter’s own editor then is forced to do by the network. In typical crusader fashion, Carter (assisted now by his new operator Theora Jones) decides this means there’s a massive story to be uncovered, and sneaks into his own Network’s upper floors to find out what it is. He find a tape of a viewer of Channel 23’s new ‘blipverts’ (adverts which cram 30 seconds of advertising into 3 seconds) spontaneously combusting from the over-stimulation caused. Attempting to escape from two hired goons he crashes a motorbike and is captured and taken to Bryce, designer of the blipverts who scans his personality into a computer and creates a virtual copy of Edison, designed to fool people into thinking Carter is still alive long enough for them to dispose of his safely. The copy jerks and stutters, leading head of the network Grossman to order it and the real Carter disposed of. Carter is sold to a body bank, and his copy is given to Blank Reg, the head of Big Time Television. Carter recovers and exposes Grossman, while his copy takes on the name ‘Max Headroom’ and turns Big Time into an overnight success.
In some ways the programme is extremely prescient, rightly predicting that the American model of television would soon be the norm in the UK, with numerous channels (at a time when the UK had only 4) and a focus on chasing viewing figures or ratings.
Carter could be said to be a ‘feature journalist’, as represented in the UK by programmes such as Panorama and World In Action. When the news first appeared on television, the BBC deliberately produced news that was simply the radio but with pictures. The newsreaders were heard, not seen and their voices simply commented on a series of still pictures in as neutral a tone as possible. This was supposed to prevent the reader’s personality distracting from and colouring the objective news stories. When ITN started to produce the news they revolutionised the way television reported on world events, and many of their innovations remain today – newsreaders appearing on the screen, an attempt at putting presenters together who had a ‘chemistry’, and outside of the studio environment, feature journalism in which a reporter went out onto the streets with the new light-weight cameras and reported directly on the story, conducting interviews to camera with witnesses, finding the image that spoke a thousand words. Or, to put it another way, showing what was happening rather than simply talking about it.
There are obvious benefits to this approach. For one thing, it is all very well to describe a scene, or even show a still picture, but it can never replace the experience of the viewer actually being able to see an event for themselves rather than simply being told about it. Being a witness (even through a television) makes an event more real and creates more of a connection with the viewer – how much did Live Aid (to choose just one obvious example) benefit financially from being able to show the general public first-hand footage of people starving in Africa rather than relying on the print and audio mediums to get the message across?
But even something seemingly obvious can be problematic. It assumes that empathy (rather than cold facts) is a major part of the news, and ignores completely questions about whether objectivity of the news is even possible. Even if journalists do not feel they are making a deliberately biased report ‘news is not a natural phenomenon emerging straight from reality, but a product. It is produced by an industry, shaped by the bureaucratic and economic structure of that industry, by the relations between the media and other industries and, most importantly, by relations with government and other political organisations’ (Fowler, R., Language In The News, 1991, p.222). In other words, there are pressures on the journalist that determine the shape their report ends up in. How much access a journalist has to those in power might be affected by the way they report on issues that involve them. If the journalist works for a commercial channel, they may have to be careful of upsetting advertisers who provide a lot of the money that funds their reports. Or, less conspiratorially, by the accepted standards of journalism and what is considered to constitute an acceptable news report in the particular medium. To focus on television journalism (as Max Headroom does), Brian McNair argues that the medium favours immediate events over the less visual narratives that lead up to them. For example;
‘the process by which famine in Africa came about and is perpetuated has largely been ignored by mainstream news outlets: only when Michael Buerk ‘discovered’ the refugee camps in Ethiopia in 1985, with all the picture-opportunities which they presented, and the individual stories which could be told, did the famine become ‘news’, and then only as an event, rather than a process’ (McNair, B., News And Journalism In The UK, 1994, p46).
There are no images to represent the deterioration of a country, no interviews to run with politicians who fail to prevent disasters. The story simply does not exist until a journalist films it. Similarly the story that Carter is following at the beginning of Max Headroom is all about explaining a series of moments – he responds immediately to an explosion in a residential block, wants to know why he is not allowed access to the crime scene, and proceeds to look for evidence to explain these issues. At the end of the programme he has the head of Channel 23 in front of his camera, and is about to force some kind of confession from him. But none of this addresses the issues that led to the story in the first place, such as obesity and unemployment (which are factors in the viewers being unable to cope with the blipverts) or the role of advertising on, and its importance to, television. Of course, these issues may be dealt with by other current affairs programmes, but Carter’s work seems cut off from its cultural context, and once Grossman and Bryce are exposed, it seems likely that the blipverts will be canned, but those other problems will continue to grow.
Michael Buerk, whilst reporting on the disastrous situation in Ethiopia, became a celebrity. And indeed, many of the journalists who are seen reporting on events in the real world become so – Robin Day, Kate Adie, John Simpson and Rageh Omaar to name but a handful. The importance of the personality of the television journalist cannot be dismissed – their cameras are our eyes, their words are our context, and viewers need to trust that what they are being shown and told is accurate and not distorted. Equally, it is important that they are entertaining, or at least compelling, and if they have some obvious physical or personality quirk to make them stand out, all the better;
‘Charles Wheeler with his lined, laconic, bird-like presence; Sandy Gall, crumpled and somehow the embodiment of agonized British decency; John Cole, a wise guide and a man you wouldn’t want to cross; Kate Adie, the nation’s plucky Girl Guide leader;… John Simpson, the granddaddy and battered panda of BBC journalism today;…and recently Rageh Omaar, the boyishly handsome witness to the fall of Baghdad…’ (Marr, A., My Trade – A Short History Of British Journalism, 2004, p282).
Carter is certainly a distinctive figure. Tall and slim with razor-sharp features and flowing blonde hair he exudes an energy that seems to have burnt all excess fat away. His American accent accentuates his straight-talking, no-nonsense approach, while the overalls he wears as a uniform give him the air of someone in authority. When talking to camera he is able to get across a sense of urgency, building anticipation of what he is about to discover. This is journalism far removed from the (literally) personality-less news that the BBC presented to its audience in the 1950s. And Carter is certainly a star. When he announces his name at the beginning of his broadcast he does so with the confidence of someone who expects it to be recognised, and Grossman’s initial reluctance to deal too harshly with Carter is prompted as much by his popularity with viewers rather than any moral qualm on Grossman’s part. Again, this is not automatically a bad thing – if Carter is a scrupulous journalist then viewers will have learnt to trust him, and assume that anything that appears in his broadcasts is reliable.
But Carter also represents the downsides to this approach. He is demanding, arrogant, and sees himself as above the law, displaying all the petulance of a stereotypical celebrity asking a club bouncer if they know who they are. While his anger at his initial operator is understandable (he stopped directing him, leading to Carter receiving a kicking from a group of thugs), the operator might not have felt the need to abandon him had Carter obeyed the initial instruction to leave the area. When Carter returns to the office he bullies his immediate boss, demanding a new operator – the best. And, being a star, he gets what he wants. He then continues his investigation in ways that foreshadow the recent phone hacking scandal, as Theora Jones hacks into the internal CCTV system and they eavesdrop on a conversation in the men’s toilets. This is (like phone-hacking) clearly common office practice – Jones does it without Carter asking – but Carter shows little concern for the illegality of the act, and later tops it by breaking and entering into the higher echelons of his own building. In this case of course, these actions are in the cause of the common good, but it does beg the question; to what extent is a journalist entitled to break the law to get a good story?
There can be no argument that Carter’s investigation into blipverts is in the public interest, but Carter himself is unaware of what he is investigating until after he has accessed the security cameras. Up until that point he is simply working on a hunch that there must a worthwhile story if anyone would dare remove his access to an incident-scene. Had it turned out that there was nothing sinister going on his methods would have appeared less the crusading seeker of truth and more like an out-of-control hack. Had Carter been working on newspapers in the present day, would he have been one of the journalists exposed for accessing the answerphone messages of anyone he happened to be investigating at the time?
Carter is not the clean-cut hero figure that he initially appears to be. At the end of the film, he corners Grossman and Bryce and gives them little choice but to confess live on air. But in order to get them there Carter (or someone at the network) must have paid Breugal and Mahler to lead them to him (they ignore the Big Time van as it passes them so it is clearly no coincidence) and Carter is happy to allow them to kill Grossman’s bodyguards in order to sell them to the body-bank. Carter’s crusading is not born of moral character, but rather of news values. As John Fiske points out, Galtung and Ruge (in their 1973 study) ‘suggest that for an event to be deemed newsworthy it should be recent, concern elite persons, be negative, and be surprising’ (‘Structuring and Shaping News’ in S. Cohen and J. Young (eds), 1973, The Manufacture Of News, quoted in Fiske, J., Television Culture, 1987, p283). How closely does the story Carter investigates fit this definition? Well, the event is certainly recent (within the last hour), it involves an explosion in a residential block (negative and surprising) and no officials are prepared to discuss what happened, suggesting some kind of cover-up (concerning elite persons). Carter knows a good story when he sees one and won’t stop until he has it - news values matter more than the individual morality of the individual reporter. Many would balk at the idea of Rupert Murdoch as an example of moral righteousness, but he first came to public attention in Australia by reporting on the plight of Aborigines. This is not to say that Murdoch did not feel genuine sympathy for them but his later ruthlessness in the business world shows that he is no soft-hearted liberal. The story was what mattered.
But at the same time, as we have seen, news stories can not exist in a vacuum and is impacted upon by other elements of culture and television production. Advertising, for example, is a major factor in television. Aside from the BBC, all television channels are ‘commercial’ channels, and make the money that pays for its programming from the advertising it can attract. Major companies were keen to pay for (usually) 30 seconds of advertising time in the breaks between and in the middle of programmes. The appeal is obvious, especially in the 1980s when the majority of people in the country would be sitting down in the evening to watch one of only four channels. A well-placed advert would beam a company’s message direct into the homes of millions of viewers – getting an advert for a product or service in the right slot where it would be seen by the majority of the target audience could make the difference between success and failure, and between a large profit or substantial loss. Of course, radio has adverts also, but they involve only sound. A television advert allows for products to actually be seen (and in the case of, for example, cleaning products, to be seen to actually work) or for a visually arresting and memorable image to be matched to them. Abstract services such as banking or insurance can not be ‘shown’ as such to the potential customer, but a well-designed advert can give them a specific impression as to the ethics and business values of one bank over the others.
This set-up leads to certain inevitable market-based considerations. Advertising space will cost more during a popular programme than one watched by fewer viewers as the more companies will want to compete to buy airtime which will be watched by 13 million viewers than by 3 million. But even with this consideration, adverts placed in front of a smaller audience can make just as big an impact if targeted properly. To put it crudely, adverts for canned alcohol are unlikely to be broadcast during the interval in a children’s programme.
There are problems with this style of advertising however, the main one being that just because a set number of viewers watch the programme that an advert is placed next to, does not mean that the same number will actually watch the advert itself. Viewers may use the advert break to make themselves a drink without missing any of the programme, or a family may use the time to discuss what they have just seen and pay no attention to the television until the start of the next programme. This is the reason for the ‘blipverts’ in Max Headroom, which compresses thirty seconds of data into three seconds of air-time. The aim is to prevent boredom in the viewer and reduce their opportunity to move away from the television, thus ensuring more viewers for the adverts (a similar trend has developed on some channels in which few adverts are broadcast between programmes, with a longer break taking place shortly after the start of the next programme, reducing the likelihood of viewers moving away from their set between programmes).
However, the companies who advertise on television are not simply buying thirty seconds of airtime – they are buying an element of power as well. Because the commercial channels rely on advertising revenue to function, should a major advertiser choose to withdraw their custom the channel could find itself in serious financial trouble. As such channels can not afford to upset the companies that pay for their programmes. This has led to situations where major advertisers have used this as a weapon against the broadcaster when they are planning on broadcasting a programme they dislike – perhaps a documentary about their industry that would paint them in a bad light. This poses a major question about the channels’ ability to make independent decisions. Even if no complaint is received, the fact that it could be might be a factor in deciding whether to make a particular programme or not. When you factor in the idea of news reporting, the picture becomes even cloudier.
One of the strengths of Max Headroom is the way it refuses to break the characters down into simple heroes and villains. The blipverts are not designed to harm people. The head of Channel 23 clearly makes the wrong decision in trying to cover-up the damage they do but does so under pressure from the advertisers who will pull out if he doesn’t. Equally the board of Channel 23 (with one exception) support his decision. The problem is that a major advertiser will pull out of their agreement if the blipverts are not used. The channel’s own data proves that viewers are switching off when the normal adverts come on. What should they do – keep quiet about the side-effects of blipverts and take the money that keeps the channel going, or come clean and risk going out of business? This is of course an extreme scenario, but on the smaller scale it is problem that has been faced by broadcasters. In Max Headroom the head of the channel bows to pressure from the advertisers and orders they continue. He is then set up by a member of his own board to be exposed by Carter, leaving the way clear for him to take over the channel. Interestingly, when asked by Carter’s editor whether he should broadcast the interview Carter is about to hold with Grossman he leaves it up to the editor, suggesting that perhaps the moral outrage he had shown up to that point was simply a mask for his own ambition, a method to use to get himself to the top. This cut-throat attitude reflects the rising importance of the media mogul in the 1980s, as two very strong characters went head-to-head in the British news arena – Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. Murdoch is the head of News International which took charge of The Times, The Sun and The News Of The World. Maxwell ran the Mirror Group titles (Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, Daily Record, Sunday Mail, The People and Sporting Life). These moguls were not detached owners of their newspapers. Rather, their views were imposed on their editors who went along with the owner’s agendas or found themselves another job. The influence was exposed in the way that Tony Blair personally met with Rupert Murdoch before the 1997 election campaign to convince Murdoch to support Labour. He did, and the change of allegiance of The Sun from the Conservative to Labour was credited with causing a swing to Labour in their landslide victory.
Films about the future almost always say more about the present and Max Headroom is no different. Partly this is intentional (the film is a satire after-all) but the way the film itself was made reflects the 1980s in ways that were almost certainly unintended. For example, the female characters are little more than ‘glamorous assistants’ supporting the men who actually carry the action. So Blank Reg at Big Time has a female accountant but it’s his channel. There is one token woman on the Channel 23 board. And Theora may be built up as the best in the business at what she does, but what she does is stay out of the way while Carter deals with all the dangerous stuff. When she does enter the field, she ends up soaking wet beneath the sprinkler system in the underground car park – hardly an empowering image.
Also, the film travels twenty minutes into the past for a lot of its deliberate inspiration. The years leading up to the production had seen the birth and death of punk as both a musical and cultural force. But the fingerprints of that movement are all over Max Headroom. This is most obvious in the character of Blank Reg, the head of Big Time Television. Reg is an aging punk who has never let the lifestyle go. He still wears what is clearly supposed to be a punk haircut, has a strong working class accent, and his ‘station identification’ contains references to two of the most important songs to be gathered under the punk label;
‘Day after day making tomorrow seem like yesterday. You know we said there’s no future? Well, this is it. This is Blank Reg talking to the Blank Generation.’
‘Blank Generation’ is the title of a song (and album) by the American band Richard Hell & the Voidoids. Hell had been instrumental in kick-starting the early 70s music scene that centred around the CBGB’s nightclub and featured bands and artists like Television, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers (both of which Hell played in), the New York Dolls, The Ramones, Patti Smith, Blondie and many others. ‘I belong to the Blank Generation,’ sings Hell, ‘And I can take it or leave it each time.’ Later in the song he dedicates a couplet to the medium that would be satirised by Max Headroom; ‘To hold the T.V. to my lips the air so packed with cash/Then carry it up flights of stairs and drop it in the vacant lot’. There is no scene in Max Headroom in which this happens, but it almost feels as though there should be, as the couplet has the atmosphere of the programme so perfectly. This is clearly a future in which the population is obsessed with television – we are never presented with any other form of entertainment, and even the homeless have access to it as working televisions litter the landscape, whether thrown away like Hell’s imaginary set or placed there for that purpose. Hell’s use of the word ‘vacant’ calls to mind a sense of the emptiness of the wasteland of deserted and crumbling buildings in which the homeless ‘squat’ and which house the small stations like Big Time. Indeed, this is one of the predictions which has aged well, with public access to televisions in city centres such as the one that used to sit on the outside of Manchester’s ‘Triangle’ shopping centre broadcasting (mostly) sporting events.
The other song mentioned is the Sex Pistol’s ‘God Save The Queen’, which uses ‘No future’ as a repeated closing refrain. Released four years after Hell’s surreal anti-anthem, ‘God Save The Queen’ is a more ferocious beast. The anti-Monarchy element attracts the attention most obviously, but the song as a whole is more a criticism of the country’s passivity – ‘Don’t be told what you want / Don’t be told what you need’ sings Johnny Rotten (aka John Lydon) as he warns of the risk of ‘England’s dreaming’.
Certainly at times Max Headroom feels dreamlike. The scenes set in the boardroom of Channel 23 are lit and shot in a hard, stylised way, the close ups on the board members play with our sense of perspective. And the blipvert problem comes from that desire to tell people what they want and need in ever more effective ways.
But more than any one specific line of a particular song, Max Headroom is clearly inspired by the nihilism of British punk and by the state of Britain in the 1970s that inspired it in turn. The ‘Winter of discontent’ saw the end of the Labour government amid the now familiar stories of strikes, uncollected rubbish, petrol rationing, closed docks, unburied bodies, a three-day working week, while ‘more than a million school caretakers, cooks, ambulance men, refuse collectors’ went ‘on random stoppages for a £60 a week guaranteed minimum wage.’ (Marr, Andrew; A History Of Modern Britain, p 375, 2007). The high-rise flat blocks that towered over the skylines of various cities and towns across the country had become ghettos for the poor, perceived in the public imagination as places of graffiti, dangerous walkways, drug dealing and poverty. As the poor got poorer, and the unemployment figures passed one million, the Labour government seemed powerless to intervene, tied into a deal with the International Monetary Fund which forced large cuts in public spending in an attempt to save the pound. In the previous decade there had been social and cultural movements to compensate that generation for the realisation that no political party spoke for you. But the hippies were no more, the mods and rockers were old-hat. No job, no money, and (if you were black) no way of leaving home without being stopped and searched by the police. What did that leave? Well, you could go out and form a punk band, but for most of the population, there was an obvious solution – as The Clash’s Joe Strummer would point out, ‘Everybody’s sitting round, watching television’ (Strummer, J and Jones, M, ‘London’s Burning’, 1977).
It hard not to agree with Blank Reg that tomorrow feels like the 1980s’ yesterday, and with Rotten that the future portrayed is ‘no future for you’.
In most dystopias the government of the future is corrupt, oppressive, fascistic. In Max Headroom the government is so totally irrelevant that they are not even mentioned. There probably is one, buts its nature is never explored. There is a police force, but they seem to be doing the bidding of Channel 23 in helping to hide the truth behind the blipverts. The hospitals seem to work to some degree as private businesses, paying for corpses and body parts, no questions asked. The Channel 23 board seem to have total freedom of programming, deciding when to broadcast porn based solely on commercial considerations and seem more afraid of what will happen to their ratings should the blipvert problem become known than of the police.
Of course, by the time the programme aired there was a very different government in place and punk as a movement had burnt out after a few years, but the problems that inspired it did not. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher may have been a much stronger figurehead than her Labour predecessors but she was a divisive one, and the strikes and high unemployment continued to be a problem, with Thatcher determined to smash the Trade Unions. The stand-off between the Government and the Miners saw the strongest direct challenge to her authority. Thatcher won (just), leaving the mining industry in tatters and the Trade Union movement enfeebled. The Labour Party were in disarray, riddled with internal divisions and sub-groups like Militant Tendency, which Labour leader Neil Kinnock (more centre-of-left than left-of-centre) had to sort out before he could look to convincingly challenge government (something he rarely achieved).
But if Thatcher was a figure of immense personal authority, her policies aimed at reducing the authority of other parts of government. She scrapped the Greater London Council, reduced the power of Local Authorities and ran a programme of privatisations that has been continued by every government that has followed her, regardless of party. This left only one group with the power to potentially challenge her – the media. Not all of the media outlets wanted to take on this role – Murdoch’s papers supported Thatcher because he did, and others were traditionally ‘Tory’ to begin with. But there was one outlet that Thatcher found especially irritating – the BBC. There is more than one reason for this. That its journalists may have been critical of her and her policies is an obvious one, but her irritation ultimately stemmed from her dislike of what the organisation represented. Thatcher values business interests and free market economics. The BBC is funded by the tax payer, is protected from the kind of commercial considerations of the other channels and while the BBC has written into its charter that it will be impartial, Thatcher and ministers such as Norman Tebbit were convinced that in fact it was a hot-bed of left-wingers who delighted in going against the government. Coverage of controversial subjects such as the Falkland’s War (and in particular the sinking of the Belgrano as it sailed away from British forces) or the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland (seen by Tebbit as a war against terrorism that the media should back in the same way as in previous conflicts in which governments had used the media for propaganda purposes without complaint) simply cemented this view. That such an organisation should dare challenge the elected government of the day was simply intolerable (Thatcher herself wanted to have the licence fee replaced by advertising, and was unhappy when a committee she established failed to recommend this). But with the Labour Party in disarray, it is hard to argue with any journalist who considered themselves the unofficial Opposition, and if the BBC has to be balanced in its reporting, it could be seen as simply extending this remit if it expanded into the vacuum vacated by the political parties who should have been holding the government to account.
In some ways Max Headroom was well ahead of the curve, noting issues which have become more important as we travel through the ‘twenty minutes’ of the title. The increased number of TV channels has already been noted, and the increased importance and ability of individuals sharing footage of their favourite visual material has also come to pass (albeit on the internet in the blogsphere, on YouTube and Tumblr rather than on television). A member of the Channel 23 board comments that to avoid losing viewers they could ‘go porno early’. When cable and satellite TV first appeared in Britain some of the channels became pornography channels after midnight, while mainstream cinema has become more sexually explicit, with real sexual acts being increasingly allowed to be pass with a ‘18’ certificate.
However the newsroom at Channel 23 does represent aspects of the social changes that were going on. The person in charge and Carter’s original handler are both presented as the kind of journalists viewers of the time would recognise – harassed, chain smoking men who sound like they attended state schools and worked their way up on Fleet Street. When Carter complains about his handler, they are replaced by Theora, who’s polished voice betrays a much more expensive education. As journalism became more technical, the level of education required to perform tasks increased, to the point where today it is expected that would-be journalists study the craft as a subject before working professionally.
Other predictions have come at least partly true. When the blipvert problem is first identified one member of the Channel 23 board dismisses the dangers to viewers on the grounds that only unhealthy people will be unable to cope with the stimulation they provide – the elderly, the disabled and those who are overweight. They, he implies, will not be missed. This is a somewhat exaggerated view of conservative ideas on those who claim welfare, but during the COVID-19 crisis, the idea that the coronavirus is not so bad because it is only likely to kill those with such existing conditions has been frequently heard. Conservative (and increasingly, Labour) governments usually make a great play of trying to reduce the welfare costs to the economy, usually by cutting benefits and making them harder to qualify for. And it is exactly the kind of viewers who will be affected by blipverts who would be likely to be claiming the most benefits. When Max Headroom was broadcast Britain’s unemployment levels had risen dramatically under a Conservative government that considered economic stability more important than alleviating the poverty levels of those out of work. She allowed council houses to be bought more easily, limiting the number of housing options for those with little money. And certainly, there is a clear boundary between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ in the future presented in Max Headroom. We see people homeless or living in caravans and derelict buildings, with access to television (through the sets that are scattered through the streets) but no real home. Interestingly however there is no mention of a government at any point in the film. Those in positions of power are the television executives and the companies which pay for their advertising. The hospitals appear to have been privatised and now pay for body parts. What we have here is the free market run riot, Thatcherism taken to a logical extreme.
Also worthy of the note is the way that in the world of Max Headroom everyone is on camera at all times – on the streets, in their offices, even when in the toilets. On the third of March 2011, the London Evening Standard reported that ‘(t)he UK has about 1.85 million CCTV cameras and the average Briton is caught on camera 70 times a day’. Grainy images of street scenes have become commonplace on the news, footage of robberies and assaults used to identify criminals and to prompt the memories of witnesses. At present that is all they can do, but Max Headroom follows the development of technology and sees a time when these cameras will provide not only better quality images but will also record sound, allowing private conversations to be overheard and listened back to by the authorities. As with the increasing surveillance of the internet, intrusive measures are justified as being in the public interest – a process that has gathered speed in recent years as governments are able to claim a need for information to aid in the fight against ‘terrorism’. Censorship and increased surveillance are relatively common during war time, but terrorism requires no breakdown in diplomatic relations, no country to be at war with, only threats from an organisation like Al-Qaeda which allows governments to exercise traditionally war-time powers in what is officially peace-time.
When people talk about the distinctions between British and
American science fiction, a common difference identified is that American
science fiction tends to be optimistic, with humanity developing towards a brighter
future through technology, or fighting for an obviously morally right cause
against a ruthless alien race. In contrast, British science fiction tends
towards the pessimistic. From H.G. Wells’ desolate futures and humanities
helplessness in the face of Martian invaders, through to J.G. Ballard’s stories
of environmental disaster and the deterioration of civilisation into savagery,
the innate belief in the basic goodness of humanity and of its manifest destiny
is generally lacking. Of course, this is a generalisation and like all
generalisations there are lots of examples that contradict it, but the grain of
truth remains. In this sense, Max
Headroom feels very British, despite its American central character and the
seemingly ‘happy ending’. Britain is presented as a wasteland in which
televisions play to the detritus (both literal and human) that flows through
it, while in the cities people either sit in front of programmes or make them
for those sitting. Into this world is born Max Headroom, the first virtual
person and one truly fitting of both the present and future – glitching,
superficial, and literally without depth. He is exactly what we will (and do)
deserve.
(c) Philip Marsh
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