Piers Morgan My revolting Spitting Image puppet

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30

Spitting Image was one of my favourite TV shows when it first aired in the mid-1980s.

The combination of its hideously grotesque puppets, and savage, politically incorrect humour, sliced through all the preening pomposity and egos of its famous victims like an electric saw through flesh.

In the manner of a brilliantly clever and ruthlessly vindictive playground bully, the series accentuated and mocked the very worst of the subject’s physical, verbal and personality traits.

So it was something of a relief when it came off air in 1996, just as my own profile began to rise high enough to warrant being targeted.

Then came the news that it was being revived, on BritBox, and this time there was to be no escape.

‘ Spitting Image are sending us an exclusive preview of your puppet,’ read the ominous email from Good Morning Britain’s editorial team last night.

I’ve had some nerve-wracking moments in my life, from annoying the boxer Mike Tyson with a pigeon joke to waiting for a Covid-19 test result.

But for sheer butt-clenching, clammyhanded terror, few have matched the next three hours until the photo arrived in my inbox. Especially when I considered what SI puppet master Roger Law and his evil cohorts have done to Michael Gove, whose face is made up of genitalia.

I opened the link like a condemned man on Death Row waiting to see if he’d received a last-second pardon.

I hadn’t.

In fact, in the precise moment that I first saw it, execution seemed a more pleasurable option; at least it’s over quickly.

A gigantic excessively fattened head sprang out at me, sporting stupendously large and bulbous chins, porcine cheeks, a beady nose, screwed-up sneering eyes, and ludicrously tiny, pouty lips that looked as though they’d just sucked on 1,000 lemons.

It was ever y bit as disfigured, revolting and embarrassing as my worst critics would have hoped. And today, after we unveiled it on GMB, it got the reaction I expected: shock, hor ror, hila r ity and disingenuous compliments.

‘Spot on!’ chor t le d Susanna Reid, who’s been fat-shaming me on air for weeks.

‘The first time I can recall a Spitting Image puppet to be quite flattering,’ tweeted Gary Lineker. ‘Oh my God, t hat’s disg usting!’ obser ved my daughter Elise, eight.

General consensus was that my puppet (below) resembles a hybrid of Keir Starmer, David Cameron and Stephen Fry, with a dash of Oliver Hardy, Jeremy Clarkson and the Elephant Man, John Merrick.

Though one person on Twitter was unhappy that it wasn’t cruel enough: ‘I don’t know if whoever made this really likes Piers Morgan,’ he said, ‘or really f***ing hates Hugh Bonneville.’

As always, it fell to my mother to pluck a positive from the debris. ‘Phew, not too bad given what they did to Gove,’ she texted. ‘His was so bad I was really worried.’

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 1

The Sun’s put me on Page 3 with the headline ‘PUPPET SHOCK: PIERS TAKES IT ON THE CHINS!’ and revealed that Spitting Image will repeatedly show me scoff ing four brea kfasts.

That’s an outrageous lie — it’s never more than three! (Porridge and honey in the pre-show briefing at 5.30am, toast and bananas mid-show at 7.30am, and scrambled eggs when I get home.)

They also included

Lineker’s quote and by coincidence, we had dinner together tonight at the River Café in West London.

‘You’d be more upset if they hadn’t done you,’ Gary said.

He’s right; I’m secretly thrilled I finally made it onto the iconic show, along with those other first-name-recognisable luminaries including Boris and Donald, Meghan and Harry, Kim and Kanye, Greta, Gwyneth and Jurgen.

It’s the most definitive confirmation of relevance in public life.

As Oscar Wilde would have said, if there’s one thing worse than being mercilessly humiliated on Spitting Image, it is NOT being mercilessly humiliated on Spitting Image.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2

Amanda Holden has been talking about her infamous cleavage, which regularly attracts thousands of complaints to TV regulator Ofcom from pur itanical Britain’s Got Talent viewers every time a breast ‘accidentally’ pops out of her skimpy dresses.

‘People have been banging on about my t*ts for a decade now,’ she said, ‘I might let them go on Life Stories. I’ll let Piers interview them — they can talk about everything they’ve been through.’

Then she dropped a bombshell: ‘Actually he saw them once because I went around for dinner at his house in L.A., and I was chatting to one of his sons and one accidentally fell out.’

This is entirely true. The ‘victim’ was my eldest boy Spencer, then 17, who didn’t flag up the wardrobe malfunction for ten minutes and definitely didn’t make any complaint to Ofcom.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3

The horrible irony of President Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis is that he’s always been a massive germaphobe.

During the hundreds of hours I’ve spent in his company over the past 15 years, he’s consistently recoiled in horror if anyone sneezes or coughs in his vicinity a nd instantly demands hand sanitiser.

I once spluttered in front of him during an episode of Celebrity Apprentice and he reacted like I’d got the plague.

‘PIERS! Are you SICK?’ he exclaimed in genuine horror. ‘I don’t want you infecting me. PURELL!’

A minion raced out with the anti-plague gel, but Donald eyed me very suspiciously for the rest of that day’s filming and maintained a good two-metre distance.

He was thus way ahead of his time in believing that the best way to avoid catching viruses like a cold or the flu is to avoid touching people.

‘The only thing better than a good handshake,’ he once told me, explaining his health strategy, ‘is no handshake at all.’

Yet when confronted with a truly deadly virus, he behaved so casually about it he may as well have spray-painted himself in Covid19 droplets. I’ll never understand that.