This article is from the February 2014 issue.
“I would have killed my mother to do that show.”
This murderous statement of intent comes from Roger Law, co-creator with Peter Fluck. The show was Spitting Image. Fortunately, Law didn’t need to go to such desperate measures for the programme’s instantly recognisable latex puppets made their TV debut on 26 February 1984, 30 years ago this month. For over a decade the show shocked and delighted viewers in equal measures: at its peak, it scored audiences of more than 10m, a figure that these days is only equalled by soap operas, sport and Dr Who. It spawned countless careers; over the years the show’s writers have included the likes of Ian Hislop, Richard Curtis, Red Dwarf creators Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, and novelist John O’Farrell, while Steve Coogan, Harry Enfield, Chris Barrie and John Sessions were among the artists who mimicked the show’s targets.
Nobody was exempt from its sharp pens and grotesque moulds: the royal family, sports stars and celebrities were turned into latex and mocked, but it was the lampooning of the era’s politicians which made Spitting Image such crucial viewing.
“It was primarily Thatcherism and Thatcher that made it. It was absolutely the right time,” Law recalls. “In the ‘70s and early ‘80s you had riots all over the country, police on the streets. It was very disruptive and divided. We were really keen to do the show for those reasons. That’s why we had an audience. It was on the button for its time.”
O’Farrell, who went on to become a best-selling author, believes it was the “sheer novelty of the idea” which made the programme such a hit. “Seeing grotesque caricatures of politicians and celebrities saying whatever the writers put into their mouths was an incredibly appealing and actually quite revolutionary notion for TV back then. Finally, the political cartoon was three-dimensional and had a narrative.” And, like Law, O’Farrell agrees the timing was perfect. “Spitting Image was also riding on the back of a mini-satire boom, following on from Not the Nine O’Clock News and the advent of so-called ‘Alternative Comedy’, which seemed to coincide with the election of Mrs Thatcher.”
Paddy Ashdown, one of the show’s targets during his time as Liberal Democrat leader, agrees that it was something altogether different. “It began with That Was The Week That Was, but my suspicion was this was a new departure in satire. The idea of using the glove puppets, and so on. It got to the heart of the Thatcher years, and all the personalities involved.”
The subject matter may have breathed life into the show, but both Law and O’Farrell recognise that those at the top of Central, the ITV franchise behind the programme, were pivotal in its birth and survival.
“Charles Denton was the last liberal controller at Central. Thatcher took the people out at the top – she put her people in,” argues Law, while O’Farrell acknowledges that the “the broadcasters gave the producers the time and money to get it right. The early shows were chaotic and generally unfunny, [and] it took at least a series to work out how to make such an unorthodox show actually work. Today it would have been cancelled after falling at the first fence.” The chaos was in part due to the demands of making a newsworthy programme. “It was a craft process with a newspaper deadline. We were trying to do a complicated magazine as a newspaper,” says Law, but when once that process was cracked, the show’s success spiralled.
Simon Buckley, one of the show’s puppeteers, believes that it was that very topicality that made Spitting Image such a success.
“The fact that (in the earlier years) we wouldn’t finish filming Sunday night’s show until Sunday lunchtime meant that we could comment on things that were really current,” he explains, adding: “It was always fun on the show to see the Queen at the breakfast table, sneering at that morning’s copy of The Sunday Telegraph.”
From the start, the puppets were brutal in their portrayals of the political classes. John Major’s was entirely grey. Norman Tebbit was a skinhead in a leather jacket, while Leon Brittan was covered in sores. The puppet version of Ken Clarke was obese and permanently drunk, and the wild-eyed version of Margaret Thatcher became more manly and manic as the years passed.
“I am particularly proud of the John and Norma Major sketches, when the two of them were sitting eating their peas, with Norma almost exploding with boredom and frustration – in fact, I think we did make her head explode one week,” O’Farrell recalls of his favourite characters. “Why the notion of Major eating peas should strike a chord with the nation is beyond me, but I love the fact that when the PM stood up in the House of Commons, Dennis Skinner once shouted, ‘Have you had your peas, John?’”
Buckley, who “began on Spitting Image as the right hand of Margaret Thatcher and ended up as the whole of Tony Blair”, admits that he wasn’t always thrilled to be handed a political puppet. “Many of the politicians were rather boring to do – I was lumbered with Paddy Ashdown in an army uniform for several series. Being cast to put your hand up another latex backbencher in a suit was rarely thrilling compared with the fun of being Barbara Cartland, Jeremy Paxman or the Queen.”
And what about the victims themselves? Time, it seems, is a good healer. “The Waddington puppet was suitably fearsome and did me no end of good. Of course, every politician who felt he was entitled to be in the show was a regular watcher,” insists Lord Waddington, home secretary for the last year of the Thatcher government, of his mildly creepy dopplegänger. As for Brittan, Law recalls that Brittan’s wife hissed in John Lloyd’s ear that her husband’s puppet was flawed because there were “not enough spots”.
Compared to Lord Baker, a minister throughout the Thatcher government, Waddington and Brittan got away lightly. Baker was gradually turned into a giant snail by the creative team, and when the show ended, he seemed to take satisfaction in declaring that it had “destroyed itself by its own cruelty”. Today, however, he looks back fondly. “I didn’t mind a bit,” he says when asked about the Baker-snail. “I thought Spitting Image was very good. Politicians haven’t got to mind about how they’re depicted in cartoons: every minor politician in the world is desperate to be cartooned, because then he’s arrived. If you haven’t been cartooned, you’re nobody.”
Jessica Martin, one of the voice artists on the show, ‘starred’ as Edwina Currie, who as a health minister was portrayed as a vampiric character. “Being an advocate of ‘any publicity is good publicity’, she wasn’t offended at all,” Martin recalls. “In fact, she bought the Edwina puppet for herself some years later.”
And those not turned into a puppet seemed to want to join the show. “Jeffrey Archer sent his picture in and a biography – no shame,” Law recalls, but Archer’s unsubtle hints were initially rejected until “he got caught up with a prostitute, so what can you do?”
It wasn’t just the Tory government that was picked on. The show’s team also had the Labour frontbench in its sights, while the leaders of the various incarnations of the SDP, Liberal Party and then Lib Dems were also given the latex treatment.
Ashdown’s puppet appears in military fatigues. “Of course I watched it. Everybody bloody watched it. If you were on there you watched with a mixture of dread and amusement, and you always pretended the amusement was greater than the dread – which it wasn’t,” Ashdown recalls. “I thought it was very good, very funny, and it was pretty accurate. It got behind a lot of the truths about running the party that everybody else hoped you didn’t know.”
But did he like his puppet? “The fact that I was once a Royal Marine is the least important fact of my life, but it’s the one that no one will ever disassociate me from. The idea of parading me around in military uniform with a green beret was ever so slightly clichéd – but my wife loved it.”
Ashdown doesn’t think his Spitting Image interpretation had much of an effect on how he was viewed, but believes his predecessor suffered.
“It was devastating for David Steel, and had a very profound political effect,” he says of the former Liberal leader, who found himself portrayed as a pint-sized sidekick of SDP leader David Owen when the two fought the 1987 general election as the joint Alliance.
“We’ll take one word from your party and one from my party”, the Owen puppet declares. “Which words?” asks Steel. “From mine, ‘Social Democratic’, and from yours, ‘Party’”. “Very fair, thank you very much indeed”, comes Steel’s meek reply.
Over a quarter of a century on, Steel insists that he enjoyed watching the exchange. “I think I was once quoted as saying that the portrayal of me was inaccurate, which sounded like a complaint. It may have coloured how people thought of me, but I still liked the programme and thought political satire important,” he argues. “I was told that the producers felt guilty and so invited me as the only politician to appear live on a programme – a special about Ronald Reagan.” He also admits that he declined to buy his retired puppet when the opportunity arose.
The Roy Hattersley puppet put the ‘spit’ into ‘spitting image’, covering whoever it appeared with in a shower of spittle. Interviewing Hattersley a few years later, Buckley says “he thought that at least people knew who he was because of the show, though apparently his wife always said, ‘But you don’t spit, dear!’ whenever she saw it.” Today, Hattersley says: “But it was the unpopularity of the Thatcher government that made Spitting Image such a success.”
Law recalls a trip to Scotland, a nation not exactly enamoured with the Iron Lady, where he was treated like a hero. “It was huge in Scotland. I went up with Fluck, and every pub you went into had 13 double whiskies lined up in a row. They loved the show,” he recalls. So it was inevitable, perhaps, that when Thatcher’s time in office ended in 1990 the show’s viewers drifted away. In 1996 the former primetime political punching bag was axed, its latex creations retired to gather dust in store rooms or, in some cases, purchased by their human inspirations. The New Labour generation and its relentless march to power seemed to provide rather less inspiration, while key writers like O’Farrell had moved on. For those left on the show, suggests Law, “it had just become a job. People had got tired.”
Once the final show had aired, Law quit television and moved to the other side of the world to become the artist-in-residence at the National Art School in Sydney. He didn’t look back.
“Did I f***ing miss it? I went straight to Australia. There’s only one thing I loathe more than puppets, and that’s f***ing politicians,” he replies when asked whether he was sad to see Spitting Image end. “Imagine having to read all the papers every day. If you were cynical to start with, imagine what you would be like at the end?” Fluck also left the world of satirical television behind and moved to Cornwall, where he works as an artist.
In the years between, nothing has ever really replaced the show. The animated Monkey Dust ran for a few years in the early Noughties, Leigh Francis, as Avid Merrion, created the hugely successful Bo Selecta!, which mocked celebrities, not politicians, while Channel 4’s long-running Bremner, Bird and Fortune was closer in style to That Was The Week That Was than to Spitting Image’s anarchic brand of puppetry. And in an age where hundreds of TV channels compete with each other and the internet, it’s difficult to imagine a satirical programme ever winning such a wide audience again. O’Farrell agrees.
“Satire really ought to flourish online with the freedoms that are theoretically available, but it would inevitably be very different; you’d never get the shared national experience you had when there were only four TV channels, and so much of the country sitting down to watch the same programme at the same time,” he admits. But that’s not to say that satirists shouldn’t keep mocking the men and women in power. In 2006, O’Farrell launched NewsBiscuit, Britain’s first daily, topical satire website. “Obviously compared to Spitting Image, its impact is miniscule,” he admits, but argues that “whatever genre or medium comes along, we’ll always need satire, and we must defend fiercely our right to offend one another.”
Perhaps, then, Spitting Image could return to our screens? Various members of the original team, such as Barrie, have said they’d welcome a return, and an animated version has been mooted repeatedly over the years. However, in 2006 a ‘Best of…’ programme saw the creation of Ant and Dec puppets without the permission of Law or Fluck, and left the show’s original producer, John Lloyd, deeply unimpressed. So for now, the anniversary won’t be accompanied by a comeback, and while Law doesn’t rule out the possibility of an animated update, it sounds as if he’s happy to keep his distance.
“As long as I don’t have to work on any more shows,” Law replies, when asked about joining the anniversary celebrations. “The scars have healed. Sort of.”
Buckley is equally unsure whether or not the show could make a comeback due to the costs involved in making each programme, the plethora of viewing choices now available, and a lack of material. “With only a few TV channels, there was a sense of ‘the nation watching’, and the next day the only people who didn’t have an opinion on the previous night’s Queen Mum sketch were the ones saying, ‘Damn, I missed it!’ I’m also not sure that there are the personalities in politics to have fun with today... George Osborne is no Norman Tebbit.” Martin is more positive. “I think the show would be a welcome return in an age where, once more, the government is held up to ridicule at every turn and our reality shows display human characters who have all the depth of Beano icons (sorry to diss The Beano). Have I Got News for You and Mock The Week are perennially popular. So why not?”
While allowing himself a wistful moment or two to wonder how the show would work in 2014, O’Farrell accepts that Spitting Image has, probably, had its day.
“There are times when a scandal breaks or a new character comes along, and I think of the fun we could have had. A Boris Johnson puppet or a sitcom set behind the scenes at the coalition, perhaps? But there’s a limited shelflife for shows like ours, and it wouldn’t have the same impact today. It’s interesting that the most effective modern satire such as The Thick of It has been about the people behind the politicians, the spin doctors and fixers, which must say something about current attitudes to politics.”
Later this month the BBC will air a documentary that brings together Law, Fluck, producer Lloyd and many of the other names involved in the creation of the show that remains comfortably established in the highest echelons of British TV satire. Gordon Brown once told O’Farrell that Spitting Image was the most important show on TV, but did it really make a difference?
“It didn’t change anything – I’m not stupid enough to think that,” Law replies, before adding, “but it kind of lanced the boil.” At the same time, it caught the imagination. Never before, or since, has a cast of puppets so effectively pulled the strings of a nation.