I have a minor obsession with interrupted TV broadcasts. They were such a strange, isolated event that could only have happened at one specific point in time when we were all watching things sent through the air on UHF waves, and so many of them have bizarre or mysterious backstories.
The ultimate, of course, is the Max Headroom incident, where a guy in a Max Headroom (80s TV character) mask interrupted an episode of
Doctor Who being broadcast. He said some really weird, nonsensical stuff in front of a wobbling screen door, then had a woman come out and slap his bottom with a flyswatter. SERIOUSLY – IT'S HEAVILY CREEPY:
The person who did this has never been found, and there have been tons of theories and wild goose chases around what happened (some of which trail off into their own crazy stories). If someone ever put out a documentary about this guy, I'd watch the F out of it.
Another great example is the Captain Midnight interruption, where a hacker hijacked an area's HBO signal to display a message protesting high cable prices. It was only up for a few minutes, but behind the scenes, the network's engineers had to overpower the hijacker's signal to their TV satellite in space through high-frequency radio waves –– they quite literally had a cosmic sci-fi battle! Eventually, the hijacker was caught and suffered quite a few legal penalties. Shoulda just paid the $12.95, moron!
And, finally, the most famous interrupted signal event in the U.K. was the 1977 Southern Television broadcast interruption. It didn't change the normal video signal, but
did overlay an audio track onto it from a supposed space alien, who warned viewers about the impact that war was having on mankind and commanded world leaders to destroy their nuclear weapons. Can you imagine hearing something like that come out of your TV in the 70s!? I'm not sure how people didn't lose their effing minds. Again, the person (people?) behind this were never caught, and the incident became a somewhat well-known pop cultural oddity years later, with a few dramatizations of it airing on British TV.
Analog broadcast media was just insane, wasn't it? Like, now that we're past that era, it's just so weird that it was the predominant form of mass communication for a full century. I'm surprised this stuff didn't happen more often – or, if it did, that more of it hasn't been recorded. Zany!
