It’s back – but can it ever be as funny?
After a 24-year hiatus, Roger Law is bringing back ‘Spitting Image’, but will it be allowed to be as funny? By Luke Mintz
On February 26 1984, eight months after Margaret Thatcher vanquished her Labour opponent Michael Foot at the ballot box, viewers of ITV were treated to the rather bizarre sight of their prime minister depicted as a malformed and fairly grotesque puppet. It was the first episode of Spitting Image, the satirical behemoth that skewered the great and the good for more than a decade, reaching 15 million viewers at the height of its popularity.
Caustic and quick on its feet, the programme came to symbolise the end of postwar deference, communicating the cut-and-thrust of Westminster politics to millions of viewers who would never normally have followed it.
And tomorrow, after a 24-year hiatus, the programme returns, this time on online streaming service Britbox. Margaret Thatcher, Michael Heseltine and Arthur Scargill have been replaced by puppets of Boris
Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Donald and Melania Trump, an S&m-clad Vladimir Putin, Meghan Markle wearing a glittery “Princess” T-shirt, Ed Sheeran, Piers Morgan, Michael Gove… and dozens more.
The driving force behind the reboot is former newspaper cartoonist Roger Law, who also co-created the original in the Eighties, which he remembers as a fairly frantic affair in which they usually had only three days to pull together a show. “I used to get so close to it all, it ate up 13 years of my life. I’d watch the show not to laugh, but for all the f----ups, and things you wish hadn’t happened. I used to drink quite a lot, usually a skinful by the time 10pm came around – it was the weekend
– but the adrenalin that used to flow around watching the show, for that reason, meant you were [soon] completely sober again.”
He is proud to have pulled in viewers from across the political spectrum – no small feat in the febrile atmosphere of the Eighties and early Nineties. He remembers one particularly impactful episode in 1986, after the American bombing of Libya, in which they satirised a speech from President Ronald Reagan – or “Ronnie”, as he was known on the programme, a bumbling old fool who addressed his citizens from his dressing gown and thought the Cold War “Domino Effect” referred to a Soviet plot to steal his favourite game tiles.
“That was a particularly good show. I was walking down the street in Cambridge on the Monday after it went out, and a very Right-wing guy who had been avoiding me for years walked across the street and shook my hand. I’m hoping in a way that this show has the same effect.”
Law says he never received angry feedback from the people he mocked – some, such as Lord Heseltine, were even happy to be photographed with their puppets. “English people can’t say ‘I was deeply offended’, because they look like they can’t take a joke.”
Indeed, Telegraph columnist Norman, now Lord, Tebbit, who served Thatcher in various Cabinet positions between 1981 and 1987, says he was always “very happy” with his Spitting Image, as a leather-clad skinhead; and David Owen, the former Labour foreign secretary who joined the SDP in 1981 as part of the “Gang of Four”, remembers laughing at his own depiction as a power-hungry villain – with a mini Liberal leader David Steel tucked in his top pocket – who would jump
on the bandwagon of whichever party was ahead in the polls.
But how will the reboot fare in the world of Twitter and “cancel culture”, when offence is taken at the smallest slight? Law admits he is a little nervous, and says they have already received some criticism over their ghostly-white depiction of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose puppet has a large nose – a detail deemed by some to be anti-semitic. “We get questions like: ‘Is your Zuckerberg racist?’ I say no, we do big noses, we do big ears. It’s not racist, it’s a personalised caricature.”
While the show has always focused more on the government of the day – meaning most of its targets this time are likely to be Conservatives – Law plans to poke plenty of fun at the Left, too. Equally as controversial as the Zuckerberg puppet has been the producers’ decision to satirise 17-year-old Greta Thunberg, the Swedish environmental campaigner.
“I was at the studio with the puppets and one of the younger
‘People can’t say they’re offended, because it’ll look like they can’t take a joke’
Most of its targets are Conservatives – but Law plans to poke fun at the Left, too
people said there’s a hoo-ha on Twitter about Thunberg. ‘She’s a girl, why are you doing this?’ And then suddenly there was laughter, and Thunberg had tweeted that she loved her puppet. That was the end of it.” But not all global figures have such thick skin. One man who is particularly bad at taking a joke is the incumbent US president, who in 2016 launched a sustained Twitter campaign against Alec Baldwin for his unflattering impersonations on Saturday Night Live (a treatment dished out to every president since Gerald Ford).
Trump appears in the new Spitting Image as a deranged blowhard whose colon has a life of it own, creeping out of bed at night to type out tweets on a mobile phone. Does Law expect any angry tweets from the White House? “Well, nobody knows where I live, and I’m not going to tell Donald,” he says, drily. “Or Putin, for that matter.”