Satire beefed up Thatcher’s image
‘People saw her as invincible’
In its most enduring sketch, Spitting Image imagines Margaret Thatcher treating her cabinet to lunch. She orders a steak, and the waiter asks: “What about the vegetables?” Surveying the room, she replies imperiously: “They’ll have the same.”
It is an amusing punchline, but Steve Nallon, who impersonated Thatcher’s voice for the puppetry satire, believes it encapsulated her personality. “We captured her dominance and whole attitude in three lines,” he says. “If you can combine a kernel of truth and comedy, you can succeed.”
Spitting Image did so from its first episode in February 1984. It soon attracted 15 million viewers, rare for its late-night Sunday slot on commercial British TV network ITV and higher than audiences for TV news bulletins.
Nallon’s Thatcher soon became almost as ubiquitous as the real Iron Lady, and has featured in many TV obituaries with her death this week. The show ran until 1996 and featured puppets of others in the public eye, such as then U.S. president Ronald Reagan and the Royal Family, but none proved as memorable as Thatcher. John Lloyd, its producer, admits she was “the star of the show.”
Week after week, she was portrayed as everything from Winston Churchill, puffing on a fat cigar, to a bullying headmistress, cajoling her “class” of ministers into line. Her masculine attributes — wearing pinstripe suits and using urinals — were contrasted unflatteringly with her emasculated colleagues. In one scene, she upbraids a dozing cabinet minister, Geoffrey Howe (grey suit, grey shirt, grey tie), telling him he is a “blithering idiot” who has “made another ballsup in Europe.” Other male ministers then chant “Geoffrey’s made a balls-up” in the manner of excitable children at a birthday party.
Far from denigrating Thatcher, Spitting Image only made her appear more powerful. The source of her downfall “was not our show, which she survived comfortably, but her own cabinet,” Lloyd says.
“In fact, we helped her image. We didn’t intend it, but people saw her as invincible and knew she was not to be brooked. Satire only works if the jokes you are making have a ring of truth. It was only an enhancement of what was actually the case.”
The show also bolstered Nallon’s reputation. He was a struggling young comic when he wrote to Lloyd, asking to do Thatcher’s voice. “They thought ‘How can a 22-year-old possibly do Margaret Thatcher?’ ” Nallon recalls. “But at the interview I told them to ask me questions aimed at Thatcher, and I improvised her answers. They loved the idea of a man doing her voice and I got the job on the spot.”
He soon became adept at his act, spotting how she would deploy different tones for every occasion.
“She had an interview voice, which could be very excitable. She would be very, very natural talking with Robin Day (the BBC interviewer), but every so often she would jump up and get excited and that would come through in her voice becoming higher,” he says.
“But when she was at party conferences, she would be very statesmanlike and have a much deeper voice. She was even louder when she was speaking in the Commons.”
Nallon also adjusted his performance as Thatcher’s voice changed during her 11-year premiership. Initially dismissed as a shrill leader of the opposition, her public pronouncements grew deeper, thanks to a combination of rising confidence and voice coaching. “She also became less posh,” Nallon says. “She knocked the edges off her voice and the vowels began to sound more natural.”
The Spitting Image impersonation infuriated as many viewers as it delighted. Lloyd was responsible for responding to a vast mailbag each week, split equally between abusive rants demanding his exile to Russia and plaudits that praised the show as a “safety valve,” allowing viewers to vent their frustration with the government. Thatcher “thought it was a dreadful program, but I know plenty of people in the cabinet who thought it very funny,” Lloyd says.
There was, however, one critic who could not be won over by Nallon’s impersonation: his grandmother Mary. The working-class Tory seamstress from Leeds was incensed he earned his living sending up Thatcher. “She completely disapproved,” Nallon says. “She used to tell me, ‘We don’t watch Spitting Image in this house.’ ”