Spitting Image Thatcher skit joins ranks of Newton, Darwin
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY is the centre of learning for historians keen to study the legacy of Baroness Thatcher as home to one million of her personal and political documents.
Now, a more unusual item has been added to the archives: the never-seen-before pilot episode of Spitting Image, in which the former prime minister’s latex likeness makes its debut.
A sketch, written in 1983, features puppets of Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit coolly dealing with letter bombs as they open the Downing Street post.
One of the letters fails to explode. “Do you suppose it’s a dud? Remind me to privatise the armaments industry, Norman, it’s a disgrace,” the prime minister says. The writers were not to know that, a year later, Lady Thatcher and Mr Tebbit would narrowly escape the Brighton bombing.
The pilot episode was never broadcast because, in the words of the show’s co-creator, Roger Law, it was “awful”. It also featured Idi Amin eating an opponent’s brain, and a sketch in which Japanese dignitaries lament the fact that “the hideous Yankee long-pigs seem to have the ridiculous notion that we all look the same to them”, but are in fact represented by puppets that look exactly the same. The sketch ends with them all committing hara-kiri.
Was that a bit racist? “You’re talking 1983,” Law said. “It is only in retrospect that you realise it was a pretty obscene thing to do.”
The video and transcript of the pilot, and the Thatcher puppet itself, are among 32 boxes of material that Law has donated to Cambridge University Library, where they will be housed alongside the papers of Isaac Newton and the letters of Charles Darwin. The main Lady Thatcher archive is at the nearby Churchill Archives Centre.
Dr Helen Mccarthy, lecturer in modern British history at Cambridge, said: “The Spitting Image archive promises to open up an entirely new perspective on the social, cultural and political shifts of those decades.”
Law, 77, created the show with Peter Fluck, and it ran on ITV for 18 series from 1984 to 1996.
A handful of other puppets will also come to Cambridge, including Mikhail Gorbachev and Alan Bennett. Many of the others were sold at Sotheby’s.
Law moved to Australia after the show ended and turned down several offers to resurrect Spitting Image, but now he is hoping to bring it back, focusing on Donald Trump’s America. He hopes that Netflix, Amazon or another US streaming service will pick it up.
“I don’t want to do it here. I did it for 13 years. I’ve got about 10 or 15 years left if I’m lucky. Do I want to spend it repeating Spitting Image as it was? No.
“I want to be somewhere where you can do what you want, and that would be on the net or pay-per-view.”