The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time

Radiohead Television

Just before Hail to the Thief came out, Radiohead were told they could have some cable television channels to fill however they liked. Thom Yorke wanted the station called The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, after a collage by John Heartfield, the German artist who cut up the Third Reich's propaganda in the 1930s. The channel never reached television. Yorke's note on the later DVD blames “money, cutbacks, too weird, might scare the children”.

So it went out on the web instead. radiohead.tv began broadcasting at 1pm on 9 June 2003, the day the album came out in Britain, and fans were asked to send in their own films for the new songs. Dilly Gent went through the tapes. The band made lots of small odd pieces of music, and Chris Bran cut it all together and invented a host, Chieftan Mews, whose look Mac Randall later compared to Max Headroom's. Episode two was running by the end of July, and episode three by October.

Did it ever get played on TV? Fucked if I know.

Thom Yorke · Guardian webchat, November 2003

24 films

The four half-hour episodes hold 24 short films, some sent in by people the band had never met and some by the directors of their promo videos. Sophie Muller made the “I Might Be Wrong” film, Mike Mills “The National Anthem” and Ed Holdsworth “Sit Down. Stand Up.”. Between them come Mews and the band's “My Showbiz Life” interviews, in which Yorke's voice is pitch-shifted and Ed O'Brien answers in donkey brays.

The rarest thing in it is Yorke alone with an acoustic guitar playing “Morning Mr Magpie”, eight years before it came out on The King of Limbs. A lot of the music under the films was never released anywhere else, and Yorke's note on the DVD makes a point of it.

sorry it's late

The DVD was announced in October 2004 for £12 from the band's site, and came out on 1 December as the first release on their own W.A.S.T.E. label. The order page explained that “Channel 4 wouldn't show it, for reasons that remain unclear. The BBC were busy.” Yorke's note inside apologised for how late it was. In America it was sold only by independent record shops, about 200 of them, which had taken around 10,000 copies by the following March.

Josh Modell of The A.V. Club expected few people to want it, then picked out “The Slave”, “The Homeland Hodown” and the unreleased songs as the reward for anyone who went through it. All four episodes have been free in the Radiohead Public Library since 2020, and when the band joined TikTok in 2021, Chieftan Mews came back to introduce them.