Chicagoist Wayback Machine: Catch the Wave

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 23, 2007 3:47PM

Some things never change. One of those is spending Sunday nights watching "Doctor Who" on Channel 11. Twenty years ago yesterday one of those episodes (from the run of the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker) was interrupted by a video pirate in a Max Headroom mask and held the signal hostage for over two minutes.

As Rick Klein at Fuzzy Memories notes, the pirate also jammed Channel 9's signal earlier in the evening, but the hijacking of "Doctor Who" stands out today for both the clarity of the signal and the weirdness the jammer aired in those two-and-a-half minutes. Thankfully, the interruption was brief; we don't know what we could have been capable of had the pirate decided to cut into "Dave Allen at Large."