Cabinet’s lack of characters and too many pulled punches make for a less edifying Image
Satire is not dead. But in the reanimated corpse of Spitting Image, it’s struggling a bit. That’s not the fault of the programme, but of the times we live in. How can you lampoon a character as patently ludicrous as Donald Trump? How to mock the Duke and Duchess of Sussex when to do so risks those involved being cancelled for all eternity? And what jokes can you make about the affairs of the Duke of York without feeling the force of Buckingham Palace’s very busy lawyers?
It’s far from being a dud. The genius of the original series was its ability to boil down a politician into one indelible image – a grey John Major pushing peas around his plate, Norman Tebbit as a leather-jacketed bovver boy, diddy David Steel in David Owen’s pocket.
When the new show works, it is along these lines. Dominic Cummings is an alien overlord with zero human traits. When he spots the Prime Minister’s newborn son in a pram, he says: “So this is what you call a baby? It looks delicious. May I eat it?” Mr Johnson – portrayed here as a buffoon who disappears at the first sign of difficulty – says, ah, well, ah, no. “If I did, would you fire me?” asks Cummings. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” Mr Johnson replies.
Then there’s Priti Patel as a Pvc-clad dominatrix, with a submissive Michael Gove. He begs her to recite unpopular Conservative opinions that only she can get away with, because she’s Asian and a woman. “We think it, you say it,” he pants.
Apart from those individuals, though, we have a problem. The greatest Spitting Image skit of them all was Baroness Thatcher ordering a steak, being asked: “What about the vegetables?” and replying, with a gesture at her Cabinet: “Oh, they’ll have the same as me.” In the Eighties, Cabinet members were characters. The current lot may be household names, thanks to their appearances during the Covid crisis, but it is impossible to find entertainment in politicians as uninspiring as Dominic Raab or Matt Hancock.
While some of the characters are good, the jokes are often weak. Of course, we may have false memory syndrome regarding the original series. But social media means that everyone is a satirist now; however upto-the-minute Spitting Image tries to be (and this first episode was hastily re-edited the day before transmission after news broke of Trump testing positive for Covid), the best jokes will have been made in an instant on Twitter.
Trump is the unfunniest character, despite comedian Matt Forde’s fine vocal work. A recurring and gross gag has the president’s colon crawling out of bed to post his late-night tweets. The writers could have had fun with Trump’s relationship with Melania, but don’t. A recreation of the Trump/ Biden debate is a joke-free zone.
Nor is there any fun to be had with Sir Keir Starmer. The team admitted that they toiled to make him funny because “basically he’s such a dull man”, and perhaps they shouldn’t have bothered. A void would have been more amusing.
The writers are mischievous when it comes to Lewis Hamilton and his tax status. But the Duchess of Sussex gets an easy ride, with the show preferring to focus on “the husband formerly known as Prince” and portrayed as a very dim bulb.
Too much time is given to international figures, including Jacinda Ardern, but streamer Britbox no doubt has an eye on international markets. I laughed out loud only once, and that was at the appearance of Greta Thunberg as a weather girl whose only forecast is to grim-facedly yell: “HOT!” There is promise here but when The Great British Bake Off can produce a funnier Boris Johnson impression than Spitting Image, there’s a lot of work to do.
I laughed out loud only once, and that was at the appearance of Greta Thunberg as a weather girl