The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Muppets satire a tough ask
You know you’re in serious trouble when a 40-odd-year-old TV comedy programme is set to return to your screens and the much-sneered-at pie shop Greggs appears to be making a better job of preparing for Brexit than the government is.
My difficulty with the reappearance of Spitting Image, the show that replaces muppets with puppets, is that I cannot possibly imagine how they are going to manage to extract the Michael, or anything else, from our current situation, without it looking like they’re actually reporting what passes for reallife scenarios occurring with the kind of monotonous regularity associated with Jeremy Corbyn being indecisive or Michael Gove acting like a weasel.
How can they create satire out of the way we live now? We are living in a big, all-pervading ball of satire and, to be frank, although it would make a cat laugh, it’s no pigging joke.
The original Spitting Image made its debut, aptly, in the Orwellian year of 1984 and enjoyed audiences of around 15 million viewers an episode until it ended in 1996.
You might remember 1996 was the year of Dunblane, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s divorce, the creation of Dolly the sheep, the founding of Ebay and the horrors of Mad Cow Disease. The Spice Girls had their first No 1, Wannabe, and top films were Independence Day, Mission: Impossible and The English Patient. Looking at the last two categories, it might make you wonder, along the lines of Noel Coward spotting the potency of cheap music, about the prescience of popular culture. Perhaps the creators of Spitting Image 2019 are just planning to pick up the pieces where they left off all those years ago.
Of course, you would think there was unlimited source material for black jokes and dig-you-in-the-ribs buffoonery in such current high-profile figures as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and the latest royal punch bags, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. But the fact is (whether you think facts are fake news or not) that most of them as individuals and public figures have already used all their own best material and are in the process of creating more unlikely forms of chaos and Victor Meldrew-like splutterings of “I don’t believe it!” with every passing day.
It is to be welcomed that the contemporary puppet-masters don’t intend to mine the deep seam of unconscious humour to be gleaned from the lower echelons of British politics. A Spitting Image puppet of Mark Francois? How could they tell… and how could you better the tale of Dominic Cummings’ journalist wife having to make an official statement that her personal space was not invaded by any section of the current prime minister? Who knows what to believe? Although if she takes her husband’s special advice, she could plaster her statement on the side of a bus and some silly sod will fall for it.
And it’s amazing to think that there might still be one or two familiar faces from the skits and sketches of the past. Kenneth Clarke, Lord love him, is probably wearing the same Hush Puppies.
And dear old John Major, of course, personified in the original series of Spitting Image in 50 shades of grey and a passion for peas, is still around and offering up his fourpence-worth like someone misreading the lyrics of Flower of Scotland (“Those days are past now and in the past they must Remain”).
But Thatcher and the vegetables seem to have trans-mogg-rified, if I can put it like that, into Johnson and the vegan sausage rolls – neither one thing nor the other, as Sir Winston Churchill once memorably described a hapless Member of Parliament unfortunately named Sir Alfred Bossom.
Which brings me to the shining example of Greggs, which appears to know something the rest of us don’t and is busy getting its ducks – or at least its pork, bacon, tuna and whatever is the major element in the aforementioned vegan delicacy – in a row. Britain’s largest bakery chain opened its 2,000th store last month, so it obviously has its finger on the pastryloving pulse of public taste, if not the inside track on the will of the people. Under CEO Roger Whitehouse, it is also leasing extra warehouse space and building up its stocks of ingredients likely to be in short supply in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
It is also now sourcing its cheese in Britain rather than abroad, which I suppose counts as a glimmer of hope or a “green shoot of economic spring” (c. Norman Lamont, 1991) for the state of the nation after Brexit (I actually typed breakfast there, which I think shows you the state of my mind about the comparison between Greggs and the government). And thanks to Greggs, if we can’t use our much-vaunted blue passports to get to Europe to stock up, it is somehow deeply comforting to know that it will be possible to head down the high street and panic-buy steak bakes.
Get Brexit Done, is it, Boris? I’m with Mr Whitehouse. Get it in a sandwich or a pastry. Job done.
How can they create satire out of the way we live now? We live in a big ball of satire