Miles Kington is that oddity of oddities: a humor columnist who’s actually funny. More amazingly, he’s British and writes mostly of Britain in British terms and he’s still funny. After being a fixture at Punch magazine for years, he started writing a column titled Moreover for the Times of London. Several collections of these were put out, so he had to be well known. At least in the UK. I’ve never heard his name mentioned in the U.S.
Anyway, I was reading his collection, Moreover, too. It was published in 1985, but the columns are obviously from the previous few years.
And one column starts…
Boing! And when did the first Max Headroom movie appear? 1985.
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case. Max Headroom’s name was pinched from Miles Kington.
And if you ever see a downbeat hero named Matt Finish, you know who to give credit to.
I seem to remember the origin being right in the movie, probably the same place that Miles Kingston got it – the parking garages over there have signs that say “Max Headroom 2 m” much like we have “Clearance 6ft 6 in” signs in American ones. IIRC (I was 10 when the movie came out), it was an British movie and took place in London. I just remember the protagonist who eventually turned into Max Headroom ended up getting in an accident in a parking garage and collided with a “Max Headroom” sign.
Back in the early 90’s I used to hang out on a Usenet newsgroup that had a running joke about Motorola Pager, the unjustly jailed South American freedom fighter.
After all, everywhere you went there were signs and ads shouting
Matt Finish has been done - it was an Australian band. Their first record came out in 1980. On looking for that link, I see that Matt Moffitt died a couple of years ago. He was a nice guy.
Back in the 60s, after a lot of political trials of the Chicago 7 and suchlike, a common graffito was “Free the Indianapolis 500.”
edwino, in case you were whooshed: That was the explanation given on the show. Of course it stems from the same joke. I was making a joke that someone else had thought of it first in print. Maybe the show’s creators saw the column and thought it was a funny idea and ran with it or maybe they came up with it totally independently.
Heck, I was joking with my wife about the names of siding for the house (a few days before I read that column) that Matte Black would be a good name for a private eye and that Satin Aluminum could be the femme fatale. Great Minds do think alike.
I always thought there should be a newspaper called The Time Being. Then journalism majors who weren’t sure they wanted to be reporters for the rest of their careers could diffidently say, “I’m a reporter for The Time Being.”
