Abigoliah: Hello there. This is All British Comedy Explained, the podcast where I, Abigoliah Schamaun, finally learn about all the British comedy TV shows I have been missing out on. And to guide us through this comedy labyrinth is writer Tom Salinsky.
Tom: Hello. Good to be here.
Abigoliah: It’s so exciting. This is season three.
Tom: Season three. We’ve done it.
Abigoliah: The long-promised—
Tom: Yes. Much heralded. Finally here. And we’re going to do satire.
Abigoliah: Can I be honest with you, Tom Salinsky? When you said we were going to take a summer break, I thought you meant we would take a summer break. We have been working—
Tom: So hard.
Abigoliah: —like demons. We’ve just been doing everything we wanted to do that doesn’t fit into a theme, basically. But now satire. Satire is the theme.
Tom: And I know you said you wanted joy and you’ve been really responding to things that are just silly and fun. But satire is a really important part of the way that British comedy kind of evolved, particularly during the eighties. We’re going to do some stuff before then and after that. There’s a lot of eighties stuff here. Thatcher’s Britain, a lot of people very angry.
Abigoliah: Yeah. It is interesting because one thing that British people like to tell me about is how your humour is so much more sophisticated than the American humour, and also how Americans don’t understand satire. And, to be honest, when I try to think of a definition of satire, it’s like porn. I know it when I see it.
But if you’re wondering what American satire is like, I will say this month on the Patreon, I will be explaining a satirical American show to Tom Salinsky called The Smothers Brothers. So you can check that out on the Patreon. But back to Spitting Image.
Tom: That’s right.
Abigoliah: We said— Did we say it yet?
Tom: No, we didn’t.
Abigoliah: Oh.
Tom: So sorry. No, it’s fine. Yeah. So we’re going to start with Spitting Image, which was kind of the defining television satire show of the eighties.
Abigoliah: How do you define satire?
Tom: So I think satire is comedy with a point. It’s comedy with something to say, usually something critical. So you can go all the way back to Jonathan Swift, who wrote a famous pamphlet called “A Modest Proposal”, which was about how to deal with poverty in Ireland by eating babies.
Abigoliah: Okay. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: So often you have to look deeper. You have to go past at least one layer to see what’s really going on.
Abigoliah: Okay. All right. So political humour and satire aren’t always the same thing.
Tom: No. Very often they are. And also, this is going to come up a lot this season, satire and topical humour aren’t necessarily the same thing, but there’s a big overlap.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Yeah. And they can look similar. Again, like we were talking about The Day Today. It looks satirical, but is it satirical?
Tom: Yeah. And nothing in The Day Today is likely to date. One of the issues we’re going to have recurrently through this season is having to take you back in time and across the Atlantic. So what was happening when these things were being transmitted and therefore why that’s funny.
Abigoliah: I do know a little bit more probably about Thatcher’s Britain than I do about, say, any other prime minister.
Tom: I mean, yeah. She was world famous.
Abigoliah: Well, and she changed— I mean, kind of her and Reagan were around at the same time, and they kind of changed the course of the country. And now we’re living in those issues.
Tom: Yeah, sure. Privatised the oil companies and the rails.
Abigoliah: Trickle-down economics. That sounds like a real thing.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: It didn’t fucking work.
Tom: Anyway.
Abigoliah: That’s not satire. That’s yelling.
Tom: That’s just anger. Yes. Spitting Image was first broadcast in 1984.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: That’s the year that the Libyan embassy in London was under siege for 11 days.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: Virgin Atlantic began operations. The Terminator opened in cinemas.
Abigoliah: One good thing happened in ’84. Well, two, because Spitting Image.
Tom: And the charity single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was topping the charts. Now, as the credits of almost all the episodes will attest, Spitting Image is based on an original lunch with Martin Lambie-Nairn.
Abigoliah: Who’s Martin Lambie-Nairn?
Tom: He’s a graphic designer. His most famous creation is the Channel 4 logo.
Abigoliah: Oh, I love that logo. It’s my favourite.
Tom: In 1982. It looks pretty much the same today.
Abigoliah: Yeah, they haven’t really changed it much.
Tom: When he designed it, it was an early experiment in computer graphics and the blocks would all rotate around.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: Which was very novel. Yeah. The rotating globe that you might remember seeing, for example, on Monty Python’s Flying Circus when they were pretending the show had already finished was a model, a physical model that they filmed. But these were computer graphics.
Abigoliah: That’s cool. Yeah. I will say one slightly off topic, but one time when I was making a reel, I went down a real rabbit hole of trying to find the old logos for each of the channels, the British channels. And yeah, the one that has pretty much stayed the same is Channel 4.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. So Martin Lambie-Nairn was musing on the fact that there was this new upstart, edgy Channel 4, but no proper satire on it. And he thought, what does a satire show look like in the eighties?
Abigoliah: And at this time, Channel 4 had The Comic Strip.
Tom: They had The Comic Strip, yes. But The Comic Strip Presents… was parodies of different film styles more than anything else. It wasn’t this sort of hard-edged, anti-Thatcher satire. And then he opened a newspaper and saw 3D caricatures created by the team of Peter Fluck and Roger Law.
Abigoliah: Peter Fluck?
Tom: Yes. Fluck and Law, or, as they are sometimes credited, Luck and Flaw.
Abigoliah: Okay. Well, Fluck you.
Tom: Yes. So these guys had begun as— I think they met as art students, and they would create these 3D models and put them in dioramas and photograph them for colour magazines and colour supplements and so on. And so Martin Lambie-Nairn looks at one of these and goes, oh, you turn these into puppets.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And then you have your satire show on television.
Abigoliah: So Fluck and Law were originally making them for ads.
Tom: Yes. Or for if there was a big interview with somebody or a big essay about some prominent politician, they would create a caricature of that person and they would be moulded in clay and photographed.
Abigoliah: Like the artists in The New Yorker, except they’re building little— They’re sculpture.
Tom: Yeah. Sculpture, exactly. Yes.
Abigoliah: Sculpture that’s photographed. This is great.
Tom: Yeah. So Martin has the idea. What he doesn’t have is any comedy or television producing experience, or any money, or any relationships with anybody who does.
Abigoliah: Who is this guy?
Tom: He’s a graphic designer.
Abigoliah: That just opened up the paper one day and went—
Tom: I think this should exist.
Abigoliah: I love this.
Tom: So he reaches out to Fluck and Law, and it turns out they had had conversations about five years earlier with John Lloyd. Now, I know that name has come up before.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. John Lloyd is a producer. Yes, yes. And he produced that show that I loved so much that we covered.
Tom: Yes. He produced Not the Nine O’Clock News, which we’ll be covering in a few episodes’ time. And in fact, he had talked to Fluck and Law about using puppets on Not the Nine O’Clock News, but had been put off by the cost.
Abigoliah: Okay, maybe that’s— His name has come up on this podcast.
Tom: And it’s going to come up again. So he starts to get excited by the idea. And so he and Lambie-Nairn and Fluck and Law and an American satirist called Tony Hendra all make this little consortium to try and raise money and shoot at least a proof of concept. Like, can this be done?
Abigoliah: And Fluck and Law aren’t puppeteers. This is fascinating because usually— I mean, Henson knew how to make puppets. They know how to make sculptures.
Tom: Yeah. So figuring this out was very difficult, and making the puppets was incredibly expensive. So the procedure was they get photographs of the person they’re caricaturing, they make pencil sketches, they sculpt the head in clay the way they’d be used to doing. Then that clay bust is used to create a mould which is filled with latex foam rubber. And then that rubber is painted, wigs added, and then they can put eyes in and add controls for eyes or ear waggles or anything else that’s needed. And then they put a costume on it and then it’s ready to go. And they cost tens of thousands of pounds to make.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: I think they figured out the budget for a pilot of Spitting Image would be something like £150,000.
Abigoliah: Jesus.
Tom: At a time when an episode of Yes, Minister might cost £30,000.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So they have got some donors, including noted industrialist, inventor and madman Sir Clive Sinclair. But they need a network.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Where are they going to go? Channel 4.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Who turned them down flat.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: One of the big problems was, in the eighties, if you said to somebody, puppet show—
Abigoliah: They thought children.
Tom: Kids’ show. So the idea of a satirical puppet show aimed at adults was very hard to get across.
Abigoliah: Just with what Fluck and Law are known for, I’m kind of like, they jumped all the way to puppets. I’m like, clay animation.
Tom: Even more expensive.
Abigoliah: Of course, because you have to move— Okay.
Tom: So let’s talk about ITV. Not by design, but we haven’t done any ITV shows so far. All the shows we’ve done so far have been BBC.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Including The Fast Show. So this is our first ITV show, so we need to talk about ITV franchises.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Have you been watching Rivals?
Abigoliah: Yes.
Tom: Okay, so you’ve got some idea.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: So this is what happened. When ITV was formed in the 1950s, it was felt that commercial broadcasting in the UK ought to be less centralised, because the point is that up until now the BBC has had a total monopoly, and the idea was to break that, not to create a second one.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So instead of having one broadcaster, they split the UK into 14 regions.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And invited individual organisations to bid for the right to transmit programmes in that region.
Abigoliah: So in America, funnily enough, I’m learning about this—
Tom: It’s affiliates.
Abigoliah: Yeah. It’s affiliates. I’m learning about this doing The Smothers Brothers.
Tom: Well, I wish you would explain it to me because I’ve never understood what an affiliate is. And the nearest I can get is it’s something like an ITV region used to be.
Abigoliah: Yeah. You’re explaining the same thing.
Tom: Okay, so independent stations would commission programmes and then in rather a kind of ad hoc way, they just meet up several times a year and argue out a rough schedule. But if a particular franchise didn’t want to put that programme out at that time, they didn’t have to.
Abigoliah: Which can cause a huge problem for the network itself. So networks that have ads on them, just from my little research that I’ve done so far — say Channel 4, say CBS, right — not only do they have their content that they want, but not only do they have to please their commissioner, they also have to make sure the content that they want is cool with all of their advertisers, and that they morally approve, and that the affiliates morally approve. Because if one domino drops, money drops, and then the network is screwed. So they’re trying to please everyone while doing commissions. And it can get really stressful, especially when you do stuff that’s politically motivated. Because if, say, the North hates Thatcher, but the South loves Thatcher, and you make a sketch that’s about Thatcher being the devil, maybe Cornwall doesn’t want it, but freaking Blackpool is all over it. And then it’s a question of whether the network cuts that sketch or they say no to the show.
Tom: So the difference is there isn’t really such a thing as an ITV network. It’s just pieced together from all these different individual regional franchises.
Abigoliah: Okay. So the network itself doesn’t run out of London?
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: It is true that all the money was in London.
Abigoliah: London was— and it’s still true, but not anymore. We have a new prime minister and he’s gonna shake things up.
Tom: The King of the North. London was one of three regions that was split in two. So there was one franchise that was doing weekdays and one franchise that was doing weekends.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And London Weekend Television, which had the franchise for London television at the weekend, was the big comedy entertainment shows, like Blind Date, Game for a Laugh. They took risks on sitcoms like Whoops Apocalypse. They were the obvious place to go for Spitting Image. And they said no.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So then they went to Thames. Thames, which was the weekday London franchise. They specialised in action dramas shot on film, but they did lots of comedy entertainment shows as well. And that’s where John Lloyd took Spitting Image next. And they said no.
Abigoliah: Oh no.
Tom: After an awful lot of no’s, John Lloyd suddenly found a champion at the Midlands-based franchise, Central Television.
Abigoliah: People always forget about the Midlands.
Tom: Now, they had some good shows to their name, but they weren’t anything like as well-funded or as dominant as the London franchises, and they didn’t have the power of a big soap like Granada had Coronation Street, Yorkshire had Emmerdale Farm. And that meant that they would always have advertiser money coming in. But there was something about the idea that the Central controller, Charles Denton, really liked, and he gave them the rest of the money they needed for the pilot.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Now they had to figure out how to make it.
Abigoliah: So just because the Midlands have it doesn’t mean the rest of the country is going to see it.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: But the Midlands will see it.
Tom: So what happens is they all get round a table several times a year and Central will say, “I think we should put this out on Thursdays at seven,” and then Yorkshire will say, “Well, we can’t put it out Thursday at seven. Coronation Street is going out Thursday at seven.” And so they argue it through.
The Muppet Show, which we’re going to come on to in a minute, I believe was saved because I think it was London Weekend Television said, “We’ll take it. We’ll put it out on Saturdays at eight,” and everyone else went, “All right. Saturdays at eight is fine.” But nobody wanted it.
Abigoliah: Interesting.
Tom: And some shows did get lost because they were on at different times in different regions. And then nobody can figure out when to watch them.
But The Muppets was where they went next to try and figure out how to make this show, because it was the only show on television remotely like this.
Abigoliah: They had puppets.
Tom: Yeah. So a woman called Louise Gold was the only British Muppet performer, so they got her in. And one of the first problems they had was hands.
Abigoliah: Of the puppets?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So Kermit and Miss Piggy just have flapping rod hands, right? But these puppets need to be able to pick things up and manipulate them.
Abigoliah: Oh dear.
Tom: And the heads are about two-thirds life size. So first of all, they tried the Swedish Chef thing with human hands. But human hands and rubber faces just looked bizarre. So then they tried rubber gloves, but then they were too fat and the hands looked way too big. And nobody wanted to scale up the heads and make them even bigger and heavier. Eventually, they were able to come up with very, very thin rubber gloves, which just about did the trick. But the whole show was solving problems of this kind again and again and again.
Abigoliah: All the hands on Spitting Image are like ten-year-old children.
Tom: So initially they assumed that the way to record this was to do what The Muppets had done, and you have whoever’s doing the mouth of the puppet also doing the voice.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: That’s how, you know, Kermit, Miss Piggy, all those characters must be done. But now you have to find a squad of experienced puppeteers who can also do accurate impressions.
Abigoliah: That is a narrow freaking column.
Tom: So Louise Gold was the first person to do the voice of the Queen on Spitting Image. A couple of young impressionists, Steve Nallon and Chris Barrie, were taught to operate the puppets. But eventually, duh, they realised a much better process is to record the scripts first, like a radio show, with experienced impressionists, and then have puppeteers practise with those recordings until they get the lip-sync right.
Abigoliah: Okay, okay. Yeah. Of course.
Tom: And having solved all of those problems, they had to face the real problem. What are these puppets going to say?
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So John Lloyd, who was the producer we talked about, and Tony Hendra, who was the American satirist, had very different visions for the show. Hendra’s version was much more visual, much more surreal. He wanted to exploit the fact that these puppets looked so bizarre.
Abigoliah: And this is the graphic designer?
Tom: No, no. He’s an American satirist.
Abigoliah: Oh, sorry. This is the satirist.
Tom: At this stage, Martin Lambie-Nairn is just getting his—
Abigoliah: Just hanging out.
Tom: Or whatever royalty he got. So one of Hendra’s ideas was, you have a sketch about Alfred Hitchcock, but the puppet is Queen Victoria.
Abigoliah: No one would get that.
Tom: John Lloyd is much more interested in getting under the skin of the politicians and celebrities and royals that are being parodied. And these two men locked horns throughout the making of the pilot and into the first series. Because, spoiler, the pilot was a success and Central commissioned a series.
Abigoliah: And Central means that all of the districts, areas, whatever—
Tom: Franchises.
Abigoliah: Franchises then would—
Tom: They have the opportunity to transmit it. And what you hope is at those two or three times a year meetings, everyone will agree to push it out at the same time.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Now, I think I talked about this when we were talking to your friend Sarah. Charles had big plans for Spitting Image. It was going to be the centrepiece of the ’84 Central season. And despite the enormous per-episode cost, or maybe because of it, because he was thinking about amortisation, he offered the team a 26-week commission.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But John Lloyd remembered how gruelling it had been just doing eight weekly episodes of Not the Nine O’Clock News, when they hadn’t really figured out what they were doing. And he managed to talk Denton down to 13.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, the thing that I’m learning is just the grind of putting out 24 episodes in a season. Thirteen with puppets, with people who haven’t done it yet.
Tom: Yeah. But there is an amortisation advantage because once you’ve paid for a puppet, it exists. So the more episodes you can use it over, the cheaper it eventually becomes.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So they compromised on 13 and they got lots of the big comedy writers of the day. Richard Curtis wrote for Spitting Image, Ian Hislop and Nick Newman, Ben Elton. But it wasn’t a happy ship because you’ve still got this tension between these two men who both think of themselves as, I’m the Spitting Image guy. And neither of them can really—
Abigoliah: And they don’t agree on the overall vision.
Tom: It went out at 10pm on a Sunday night, and there was a big emphasis on topicality, on doing stuff close to the wire, making it as immediate as possible. And that does mean those early episodes look a bit cheap and nasty.
Abigoliah: Because they were doing it so last minute.
Tom: And it was assumed that you would do this with a laugh track, but that was phased out very quickly. I think maybe the first two episodes have a laugh track.
Abigoliah: Meaning that they would show it to an audience or that it was canned laughter?
Tom: It was laughter after they showed it to an audience. Britain has a very slim tradition of actual canned laughter.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Yeah. So eventually, John Lloyd got his way. Tony Hendra left midway through the first series, and that paved the way for Rob Grant and Doug Naylor to take over as script editors.
Abigoliah: Doug Naylor.
Tom: Rob Grant and Doug Naylor.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Douglas Naylor, Doug Naylor. Do those names mean anything? Apparently not.
Abigoliah: No.
Tom: So they would go on to create Red Dwarf a few years later.
Abigoliah: You know what? People keep asking about Red Dwarf. It’s like, when are you guys going to cover it?
Tom: And I’ve written two books about it.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I was gonna say, while you’re waiting, there are two great books about Red Dwarf.
Tom: So they took over as script editors, and their big contribution was they started reimagining the show and seeing the puppets less as stand-ins for topical jokes and more like sitcom characters with memorable personalities.
Abigoliah: Which takes us back to the only thing we can compare to: The Muppets.
Tom: Yes, exactly. So you kind of know what sort of person this character is.
Abigoliah: Which makes sense because you know what sort of person the person is.
Tom: Yeah. But the thing is, I think up until then, a different sketch about Margaret Thatcher would portray her in a different way. But what Grant and Naylor said was, we have to figure out what our Spitting Image take on this person is, and then run that through over episodes, seasons, years.
Abigoliah: I think this is very smart. Smart boy.
Tom: So you have war-crazed cabinet minister Michael Heseltine. You have smooth, domineering David Owen opposite earnest little David Steel. The royal family they imagined as a suburban household, and so on and so on and so on. And so the show becomes a proving ground for new writers and for young impressionists. So on the voice side, you have Chris Barrie, Harry Enfield — we talked about him last week — Jan Ravens, Jessica Martin, Steve Coogan cut his teeth on Spitting Image, John Sessions, you might remember from early episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Abigoliah: Yeah. Sorry, I just have to pause to tell this story because it’s one of my favourite things. Craig Ferguson came over to the Edinburgh Fringe one year to do, like, a talk show, and my mother came over that year and she wanted to go see Craig Ferguson. So we got tickets, and his guest was Jan Ravens. And my mom was like, “I want to go see her show.” And I said, “Yeah, no problem. But mom, she does a lot of impressions. We’re in Britain. I don’t think you’ll understand some of the references.” And she’s like, “I want to see it. I want to see it.”
I got tickets to see Jan on my mother’s birthday, and we go see Jan Ravens. And at the time she’s doing, like, Nicola Sturgeon and people like this in the show. Show ends. My mom turns to me and she goes, “That was wonderful.” And I was like— And it was so funny. I was like, “Did you know who she was impersonating? Like, do you know who Nicola Sturgeon is?” And my mom goes, “No. But the impressions were perfect.” I was like, she wasn’t wrong.
Tom: Harry Enfield’s impressions were not perfect.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But what he realised was because the puppets looked so extraordinary, if you do a real impression, it doesn’t work.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So his version of Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd sounds nothing like Douglas Hurd, but does fit the puppet with its absurd ice-cream-cone hair very well.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So he says, depending on which interview he’s giving, either this was his brilliantly insightful contribution to Spitting Image, or this was his solution to the fact that he’s a lousy impressionist.
Abigoliah: So nowadays, when people will go back and watch Spitting Image, do they know who, like, Douglas Hurd is?
Tom: I mean, I do.
Abigoliah: Yeah, but you lived through it.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: It’s—
Tom: It’s not repeated very often, being a topical show.
Abigoliah: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.
Tom: Now, the biggest problem with the first series came with the very first episode. After the official ITV censor had passed the show uncut, a very embarrassed Charles Denton had to call the Spitting Image producers into his office and tell them that the three sketches featuring the royal family all had to be cut by order of the board.
Abigoliah: The board of—
Tom: Of Central. Central was opening a £2 million TV studio the following week, and they had asked Prince Philip to open it.
Abigoliah: Oh dear.
Tom: And it was felt discourteous to put a rubber effigy of him on television only a few days before.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So big problem because these are complicated shows, and this is days before transmission. And Denton said if they wanted to pull the whole programme, he would quite understand them walking out. And in fact, he was quite likely to walk out with them. John Lloyd eventually agreed to cut the programme, but not to provide new material to fill the gap.
Abigoliah: I was gonna say, like, three sketches. How long do these run?
Tom: 24 minutes.
Abigoliah: Yeah. 24 minutes.
Tom: So that’s probably about four minutes of material.
Abigoliah: Yeah. That’s insane.
Tom: So even if you wanted to, there wasn’t time to shoot any more.
Abigoliah: Well, that’s just it. Yeah.
Tom: So Central’s board getting their way meant the episode running short, and then Spitting Image‘s lawyers had the contract redrafted to make sure this couldn’t happen again.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But it got the show off to a rocky start. And the reviews weren’t kind early on either. But my favourite story about Spitting Image is this one. And I remember this happening so vividly. When it came back for a second series, somebody planted a news story that the show would be featuring a puppet of the Queen Mother for the first time. This was enough to get at least a week’s worth of angry letters and very high ratings for the seventh episode in which this would supposedly be happening.
Abigoliah: Of course, because everyone wants to see it. Angry watch or happy watch, you get everyone’s eyeballs on it.
Tom: The seventh episode gets all the way to the end credits before a caption appears, explaining the whole thing had been a scurrilous rumour and there were no plans to make any such puppet.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Following which, the Queen Mother puppet popped up in the corner of the screen and complained, “Oh, what a shame. I was really looking forward to that.”
Abigoliah: That’s amazing. And the Queen Mother was quite beloved.
Tom: Oh yeah.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: National treasure par excellence. In later episodes, she was reinvented as a gin-soaked lush, with Steve Nallon giving her the voice of northern comic actor Beryl Reid, of whom you’ve never heard.
Abigoliah: No, no, no, no, no.
Tom: So the other funny story about this is, at the end of the first year, there’s also a bit of a clean-out of writers, which didn’t please a young up-and-comer, who we’ll be meeting later when we talk about Drop the Dead Donkey, a young up-and-comer called Guy Jenkin.
And he was incensed at having been excluded for, as far as he could tell, no very good reason. But by this stage, the show was accepting material from unsolicited writers. So he began sending in sketches under the guise of a 14-year-old schoolgirl named Sarah Yallop. And when one of Sarah Yallop’s sketches made it to air, he wrote to the production office complaining that none of her school friends believed her, resulting in a three-line credit the following week, which read, “Yah boo sucks to anyone who didn’t believe she wrote the Norman Tebbit joke last week.”
And by now the show has kind of become part of the furniture. It settles down to two runs of six episodes every year. And cabinet ministers come and go. American presidents come and go. Movie stars have their moments in the sun and fade away. But every year, Spitting Image is back with new puppets, new voices. The writing teams evolve. Different people come in and out doing the impressions, but it’s now become, like, what’s Spitting Image going to tackle this—
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: I think the nearest comparison these days is probably those American talk shows like John Oliver.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Like, how is John Oliver going to react to this?
Abigoliah: Or CBS before they kicked Colbert off.
Tom: Yeah, exactly. So what to show you? So I’ve ended up with a show from the third series, so you can get a sense of early days. And this is interesting because it includes a song, and I know you like a comedy song.
Abigoliah: I certainly love a comedy song.
Tom: And this song ended up at number one on the UK singles chart for three weeks.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yes. And then as I was going through old episodes, I landed on series 12, episode one, which was broadcast days after the 1992 general election. So that gives you one news event to anchor everything off.
Abigoliah: And is that what brought on Blair?
Tom: No, he was ’97.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: So ’92 is the election that John Major fought and won.
Abigoliah: See, John Major is one of those guys I don’t really know, and every time they say his name, it doesn’t sound real.
Tom: The only thing to know about this is everyone assumed that Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party was finally going to end more than a decade of Tory rule, and rather unexpectedly, John Major managed to nick a small majority. And that’s really all we need to know to appreciate the 1992 episode.
Abigoliah: Okay. So it ran for six episodes as a series.
Tom: But they did two series a year.
Abigoliah: But they did two a year. So they would run consecutively?
Tom: No, no, no. They’d do a spring one and an autumn—
Abigoliah: No, no, I mean the six episodes.
Tom: Oh, yeah. They’d do a run of six.
Abigoliah: Okay, cool, cool, cool.
Tom: All right. What are you expecting?
Abigoliah: I am expecting some really upsetting-looking puppets. I’m now expecting the puppets, honestly, even though you said they have these rubber hands, not to have good dexterity, and there’s going to be a lot of bumbling of stuff. And I’m expecting you to have to turn to me and be like, this was the cabinet minister who did this in 1982, and that’s why everyone was up in arms about him. I wonder how much of it I’ll understand.
Tom: Let’s find out.
Abigoliah: Let’s do it. I’m excited.
* * * * *
Tom: All right. So a little journey through British political history.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: How much of that made any sense to you?
Abigoliah: A lot more of it did, I think, than I thought it would. What’s funny is how it’s very reminiscent of today.
Tom: Like some things never change.
Abigoliah: Some things never change. I will say, the sketch with Reagan wanting to be friends with an autocratic dictator and his aides — I don’t know, we’ll call them aides, I’m not sure who they were—
Tom: A running joke that he called them all “aide” because he couldn’t remember more than one name.
Abigoliah: —was like, no, no, no, you can’t. I’m like, I wish we had someone to stop the current president from becoming friends with autocratic dictators.
The episode about Labour losing the 1992 election really did remind me of when Trump ran the first time and when he ran recently with the polls. Do they know why Neil Kinnock didn’t win? Looking back, do they know why the polls were so skewed?
Tom: There’s a few things. I mean, there was an infamous rally only a few days before the election where Neil Kinnock seemed disconcertingly triumphant.
Abigoliah: Oh, did he seem too happy?
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: The public hate a happy person.
Tom: The British public. That put people off. And I can’t remember if that was the year of the shy Tories. There’s always these things with pollsters trying to come up with theories as to why they got it wrong. I think the exit polls are pretty accurate, as they almost always are, but you can’t release an exit poll until after the polls are closed.
Abigoliah: The hard thing about looking at satire is to be like, oh, some things never change. And that “everything’s coming up roses” thing kind of tugged at my heartstrings a bit.
Tom: There was something I meant to bring up in the first half and I didn’t put it in my notes. But when it came to the end of the first series, there was a freelancer who sent in a spoof of the Sting song “Every Breath You Take”, which was about military build-up and these huge governments with their enormous military arsenals. It was called— Is it “Every Bomb You Drop” or something like that? Oh, “Every Life You Take”.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: And the production team really liked this. They liked it so much that, A, they went through it and took the obvious jokes out and just made it dark.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And then they got Sting to record it.
Abigoliah: And he did?
Tom: Yeah. So the first series ends with that song from Sting. So they were able to do these more hard-hitting, or B, just more emotionally resonant things from time to time.
Tom: “Every Bomb You Make”, that’s right. Every bomb you make, every— every life you take, I’ll be watching you.
Abigoliah: Do you think satire is still satire when it’s moving or thought-provoking but not funny?
Tom: I think you have to earn those not-funny moments. Remember our conversation about does a bit of drama make a sitcom richer or merely less funny? I think it’s the same here. I think you earn your right to express your view by expressing it in an entertaining way. And if you’ve done that, every so often you’re just allowed to look the audience in the eye and say, well, this is what I think.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And if you do it too often, you just kind of become preachy.
Tom: Exactly. Yes.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I think that’s a beautiful way to look at it. I really liked it.
Tom: How upsetting were the puppets?
Abigoliah: The puppets are really disconcerting with their weird man hands. I do love that Margaret Thatcher’s just in a suit.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: I really liked that.
Tom: They set out with the writers— She was actually very hard to satirise because most of the things we criticised her for — being manly, being decisive, not taking any shit from anyone — are kind of what you want from a leader.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny because as awful as she was, you gotta admire her for getting ahead in a man’s world. But she didn’t want any other women to get ahead, if I’m right about that.
Tom: Yeah. There’s a very famous sketch set in a restaurant where she’s out to dinner with all the rest of the cabinet, all men, and the waitress says, “What would you like?” And she says, “Oh, the steak, please.” “How would you like that?” “Raw.” “And the vegetables?” “They’ll have the same as me.”
Abigoliah: And that’s from Spitting Image? Oh, I like that. I thought it was great. So I think I have heard maybe from you that the puppets deteriorate very quickly.
Tom: Yeah, they’re made of latex foam rubber and they’re quite delicate. So some were preserved when the show finished. Some people made arrangements to buy their own puppet.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: Roy Hattersley, who you only saw briefly in that “everyone trying to think of reasons why Labour lost” sketch. You just saw him briefly. He had an underbite and a bit of a lisp. And so Spitting Image made it even more grotesque and had a mechanism to allow spittle to fly out of his mouth as he talked.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: Which Roy Hattersley— I think he did this one too many times, a little bit like the lady doth protest too much, but said he was very proud to be the only puppet on Spitting Image that actually spit.
Abigoliah: Okay. Right, guys, I can take a joke. Was there any big pushback? Did anyone come out and were really angry about the way they were portrayed on Spitting Image?
Tom: Not really. Like I said, the business with the Queen Mother and the business with Prince Philip was about the only one.
Abigoliah: But Prince Philip and the Queen Mother didn’t come out—
Tom: Exactly. It’s a bad look. It’s a bad look to say, “How dare they? Don’t they know how important and fabulous I am? How dare they take the piss out of me the way they do everybody else?” Trump, of course, hasn’t learned that lesson. But it’s a bad look.
Abigoliah: It is. And I like the Pete Townshend sketch very much, and the song. “Baa baa baa chicken.”
Tom: “Hold a chicken in the air.”
Abigoliah: “And a deckchair up your nose.” I’m like, yeah, I’m into it, man.
Tom: You hate the song. You’ll be singing it all week.
Abigoliah: Oh, yeah. It’s a real earworm.
Tom: By Grant and Naylor, and I think tune by Philip Pope. They did quite well out of it.
Abigoliah: I really liked it. I guess with all satire, it’s interesting to watch and learn at the same time about, say, John Major or Neil Kinnock. Because I know John Major as a name, but I don’t think I knew about Neil Kinnock at all. I don’t know about this section of British politics.
So it’s almost like I feel like with something that’s satirical, it can be weird to go back and watch because you’ve already been through it. But like I said, for me, it’s like, oh look, it’s adult Sesame Street. I’m learning about British politics.
Tom: This edition of Sesame Street is brought to you by the number ten.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. I get it, because the house is Number 10 Downing Street. You gotta live in Britain to get it. You gotta live in Britain to get it.
I mean, I’m just more kind of baffled about the making of it. And I know you explained so much, but I’m like, okay, they had to have a whole studio built so people could walk underneath the puppet.
Tom: That’s built up to kind of shoulder height so that you can do the puppets above your head.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: I think they did the same thing that they did on The Muppet Show of having a monitor at foot level. So you’ve got the puppet up here and you can look down at your feet and see what things look like to the cameras.
Abigoliah: And they were all lip-syncing.
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Which is harder, I think, probably, than voicing it yourself. There are moments where you’d see the puppet’s mouth open and then shut, almost like it was going to say something, but it wasn’t the line yet. And so you’d have two people on each puppet because you’d have a hand—
Tom: Only if you need two hands.
Abigoliah: Only if you need two hands.
Tom: If you need one hand, then you have right hand does the mouth and left hand is the left hand of the puppet. If the puppet needs a right hand as well, then it’s an extra puppeteer coming in to do that.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I know what they’re made of. They just look like they smell really bad.
Tom: I don’t think they would.
Abigoliah: No?
Tom: Nobody’s talked about them smelling bad that I’ve been able to find.
Abigoliah: They’re just real. They are upsetting-looking. They are the things of nightmares.
Tom: But it was a kind of badge of pride, ultimately. Like, you’re famous enough to have a Spitting Image puppet.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: Given that they cost £20,000 to £40,000 each to make.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: I mean, if you were someone like Margaret Thatcher, then they would do different iterations of you over the years. They’d find different ways of— You saw it at the end there. Kenneth Clarke, who started out as a pretty ordinary puppet, but then they made him more and more greasy as time went on and eventually turned him into a slug.
Abigoliah: Okay. Is that why he was a slug there at the end?
Tom: Because he has greasy hair.
Abigoliah: Oh, is that why they did that to him? I found that very— I didn’t— The slug was visually upsetting to look at. I didn’t quite understand why it was a slug. I thought it was because he was a bad person.
Tom: I mean, he was a Tory cabinet minister.
Abigoliah: He was also a bad person. Yeah. Okay. I just kind of— It’s one of those where I want to watch more. I definitely liked it. And when you look at what they did and how much ingenuity it took to make it, I deeply respect the project and how difficult it was. And it all started by a graphic designer going, I have an idea. It’s insane that it got made.
Tom: Yeah. And it ran for a long time. It was 18 seasons over 12 years, I believe.
Abigoliah: That’s amazing. What was your take when you first saw it?
Tom: It was part of the furniture. I remember it coming on. I remember that gag with the Queen Mother very clearly. And it’s just what you do. You’d sit down on a Sunday night, kind of at the end of the week, and the week’s news would be satirised. But what it meant was, I, and lots of people of my generation, could name all the cabinet ministers and most of the frontbench from the Labour opposition because we’d see them on Spitting Image.
Abigoliah: Educational and funny. This show just gets— The more you explain it to me, the more I love it. Did they have trouble finishing scripts and getting stuff through the censors? Kind of like, you know how South Park, it’s that story of they turn it in so last minute, it’s like, we can’t change it now? With the exception of the three sketches they had to take out at the beginning.
Tom: Yeah, kind of the opposite happened with Spitting Image. So as time went on, as it became part of the furniture, as the way of making it became more streamlined, what they realised is they give themselves like an eight-week run-up to the series, during which time they can write and spend as much time as they need filming properly sketches which are topical because they are about what’s happening this year, which aren’t going to suddenly go out of date.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And they had like three or four minutes or less of material that was actually shot in the week of transmission, which had to be as simple as possible, like one or two puppets against a pretty ordinary set. But all the more elaborate stuff, like that great big Who set piece, that would have been thought up months in advance and it’s not going to go—
Abigoliah: Out of date. Yeah. And you could just put that in anywhere.
Tom: Exactly.
Abigoliah: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.
Tom: So the election was a little bit different because they knew they were going to have to jump one way or the other. So presumably, I would guess — I don’t know this for sure — but presumably they were writing sketches for both outcomes.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: And then having to shoot as much as possible. So the election would have been on a Thursday, so they’d know the result late Thursday night, early Friday morning. And the show would have gone out on a Sunday afterwards.
Abigoliah: Oh, wow.
Tom: So all that stuff about what actually happened would have been shot Friday and Saturday.
Abigoliah: Okay. So they would have waited to shoot it. They didn’t shoot two?
Tom: I don’t think so because the specifics are going to be too important. Something like that Chris Patten sketch. It’s two or three puppets in front of a door, so it’s relatively easy to do compared to some of the other more elaborate things.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the one where it’s like all the news pundits don’t know what to do.
Tom: Yeah. That works whatever the outcome.
Abigoliah: Yeah. But you could shoot that early in the week. Because they don’t know.
Tom: There’s going to be the election. There’s going to be a result. And all those pundits are going to be discombobulated.
Abigoliah: Yeah, of course. Wow. It’s really brilliant. I loved it. I thought it was great. I really did enjoy it. I’m debating on whether to put it on the shelf of fame.
Tom: Well, while you debate, shall I tell you— It’s not a very long story because I’ve told you most of it, but I’ll tell you briefly what happened next.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Tell me what happens next.
Tom: So John Lloyd moved on in 1986, and various producers took his place. Some quite famous names. Geoffrey Perkins, who we talked about in connection with The Fast Show, David Tyler. Bill Dare was the one who really kind of put his mark on it.
Perhaps more seriously, when Margaret Thatcher stepped down as prime minister, the show lost a bit of its identity. And at first they found John Major very hard to satirise because he was this grey, boring man who literally had run away from the circus to join a firm of accountants.
Abigoliah: Is that a real thing?
Tom: That’s a real thing.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: His parents were in the circus and he opted for accountancy instead.
Abigoliah: That’s a— Hey, yeah. You want your kids to grow up and be accountants. That’s true.
Tom: So eventually they painted him completely grey and made a feature of the fact that he was this colourless, bland figure. And they had a running joke with him eating peas with his wife. And then to add a bit of interest, they imagined that he was having a torrid love affair with Health Secretary Virginia Bottomley.
Abigoliah: Was that a real last name?
Tom: Virginia Bottomley, yes, it was.
Abigoliah: The poor woman.
Tom: The affair was not real. However, many years later it was revealed that John Major had been having a torrid love affair with former Health Minister Edwina Currie.
Abigoliah: Really?
Tom: Yes.
Abigoliah: Wow.
Tom: And you can just imagine the John Major and Edwina Currie going, thank God they picked Virginia Bottomley.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. Can you imagine though, when you first see it, it’s like, do they know? And they’ve just covered— Oh my gosh.
Tom: But you know what finally did for Spitting Image?
Abigoliah: What?
Tom: I mean, various things. Ratings have been declining. The core writing team left in 1993 and were hard to replace. But one of its original writers, Ian Hislop, had been appearing on a little show called Have I Got News for You since 1990, which was on the BBC and was an awful lot cheaper than Spitting Image on ITV and was getting much more viewers.
Abigoliah: So is it when Ian left that—
Tom: No, it’s that Spitting Image starts to look incredibly expensive for the number of viewers it’s getting, compared to what the BBC is able to do with a tiny budget and just five people sitting behind a desk.
Abigoliah: Of course.
Tom: So it was cancelled in February 1996, just over a year before Tony Blair’s New Labour won the general election.
Abigoliah: Really? Because they would have had a heyday going through that.
Tom: Other satirists had to take over. Chiefly, we’re not covering him on this season, but the baton was picked up by Rory Bremner, who was one of the impressionists who worked on Spitting Image, who had his own show at this time. And he was the one who kind of satirised the Blair years.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: But yeah, they just missed out on satirising Blair. So the whole of the Spitting Image run takes place under a Tory government, first Thatcher and then Major.
Abigoliah: Interesting. And am I right in thinking that they’ve done reboots or specials of this?
Tom: So various international versions were tried both while the show was still on the air and after it had finished. In 2015, I don’t know if you remember this, there was a very short-lived topical comedy show called Newzoids with much cruder puppets, which was hyped as a modern-day Spitting Image, but nobody watched it.
But Spitting Image was resurrected for real in 2020, with some of the old team returning, including one of the directors, Steve Bendelack. But I don’t think Fluck and Law were involved. And that ran for two years, and then it was turned into a West End stage show in 2023 with Idiots Assemble: Spitting Image the Musical, which was written by Al Murray, Matt Forde and Sean Foley. And new episodes are still being produced, but now they’re only on YouTube.
Abigoliah: Oh, okay. So it’s still going.
Tom: It’s still going in theory. I think that the run from ’84 to ’96 is—
Abigoliah: Is the show. Yeah, yeah.
Tom: And in particular, when it came back, it was actually on the telly. I watched a few episodes and one of the things that really disappointed me was how feeble the caricature of Donald Trump was. Because they’ve turned Kenneth Clarke, like I said, who never really did anybody any harm. I mean, he was a pretty standard Thatcherite cabinet minister, so he didn’t do a lot of good. But he wasn’t the devil. But they turned him into a slug. But the Spitting Image puppet of Donald Trump is basically just a guy.
Abigoliah: Okay.
Tom: He should be Jabba the Hutt. He should be grotesque.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: So that was one of the things that disappointed me about the new series. And it wasn’t very funny. But of course, people said of Spitting Image, a bit like Saturday Night Live, people started saying that it wasn’t as funny as it used to be about as early as episode three.
Abigoliah: Yeah.
Tom: That was always the refrain when it was on in the nineties. Oh, back in the eighties it was really worth watching.
Abigoliah: Yeah, of course. Of course. It’s always funnier the first time you see something. And of course, like Trump, well, with all of them, you’d think they’d been satirised so much. But with Trump, you already had SNL and people doing so many impressions of him. I wonder if that stifled the creativity a bit. Like, we can’t make him— We have to keep him looking like Trump.
Tom: Yeah. We have to do better than Alec Baldwin.
Abigoliah: Yeah. I don’t know either.
Tom: Anyway, that is the story of Spitting Image. It’s a little bit hard to come by if you do want to watch more. There is a box set of the first 12 series which you can get, but that’s quite expensive. You can find individual sketches on YouTube, so that’s probably your best place to look if you want to see more. If you Google Spitting Image, you’ll come— I think there’s some whole episodes on there and some classic sketches.
Abigoliah: Yeah. Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. And you can just watch a supercut of a bunch of sketches because it is sketches. It’s not like— It’s always sitcoms that it’s like, how do I find this?
Tom: And there are people whose fame, I think, was bolstered by the fact that they were on Spitting Image and being parodied. People who we might not have heard of, or we might not have had the same jokes about, like Jeffrey Archer, who has featured very briefly there. People always making jokes about what a terrible novelist he was. Would they have made the same jokes if Spitting Image hadn’t got there first? I don’t know. Maybe they would.
Or the best example is— So my play The Gang of Three goes up to the formation of the SDP by Roy Jenkins. David Owen then became leader, and then for some considerable years the SDP and the Liberal Party formed an SDP–Liberal Alliance. So David Owen as the leader of the SDP and David Steel as the leader of the Liberals. But they contested elections together.
And that relationship was parodied by Spitting Image endlessly, with David Owen portrayed as smooth, urbane, alpha; David Steel portrayed as tiny, shrill and in David Owen’s pocket, sometimes literally in his pocket.
Abigoliah: Oh, really?
Tom: And there’s a famous sketch. “We’re going to form a proper joint party.” “Yes, David.” “And what will we call our joint party?” “Well, David, I think we should take one word from my party and one word from your party.” “Oh, yes, David. How will that work?” “Well, David, from your party, I think we should take the word ‘party’.” “Oh, and what will we take from your party, David?” “From my party, I think we’ll take the words ‘social democratic’. So it’ll be the Social Democratic Party.” “And who will lead it?” “Well, David, I think we should take one name for the leader from your name and one word for the leader from my name,” and so on and so on.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tom: But in the end, it was David Steel who knifed David Owen when the alliance came to an end. So it turned out that Spitting Image got it wrong, and David Steel had been the one who actually held the power.
Abigoliah: But they got it so close so many times.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: With the affair of John Major.
Tom: Yes. I mean, that’s extraordinary.
Abigoliah: That’s insane.
Tom: That didn’t come out until long after Spitting Image had finished.
Abigoliah: I just also think it’s so cool that that’s how you knew the names of all the cabinet members, because I don’t know the names of all the cabinet members. I mean, it’s all being shuffled up right now at the time of recording. You know, I think just by the sheer ingenuity of it, and I did very much enjoy it, I think it does deserve a place on the shelf of fame.
Tom: As we said, the shelf of fame is now pretty stuffed. It’s no shame not to get on the shelf of fame anymore when you’ve got these greats.
Abigoliah: But no, but you know, it’s controversial. I’m gonna take off Reggie Perrin and put it at number ten.
Tom: Okay. All right.
Abigoliah: Yeah, yeah. That’s where I— I feel right about that.
Tom: It was a really important show.
Abigoliah: Yeah. And it just— I mean, I’m a sucker for a great imagination, you know? And it’s so kind of disconcerting and funny to watch. I mean, just the puppets are— No one said, let’s make them look nicer.
Tom: No.
Abigoliah: And I don’t think they even look fun. I really do think they’re the stuff of nightmares.
Tom: They are unsettling, it’s true. Can you imagine wanting to buy your own?
Abigoliah: I would absolutely want to buy my own if I had ever been satirised on it. And then I think I would put it in a box in an attic. Or then I’d be afraid it would come to life and kill me. I don’t know if I’d want one in my house. Is there anything else to cover with this one?
Tom: I don’t think so. I think that’s it. So next time, we’ll be watching the show that kind of defined what satire on television could be and should be, and that’s That Was the Week That Was. So we’re going way back in time to the early 1960s, and we’re going to see something which was incredibly influential. But whether it’ll make any sense to you remains to be seen.
Abigoliah: Yeah, this is a tricky one. Well, thanks guys so much for listening or watching the podcast, if you are on YouTube. If you want to watch our podcast live, go to YouTube.com— Just— It’s on YouTube.
And also if you want to support the podcast further, a couple of things you could do. Leave us a review on your podcatcher app. That always helps us find new, cool people to listen to the podcast. Also tell a friend. And finally, we do have a Patreon where we will be doing American shows. And as I said before, this month we will be covering The Smothers Brothers. Can’t wait.
Tom: Yeah.
Abigoliah: Talk about— I wasn’t alive when The Smothers Brothers— And I’m like, now I gotta learn about the Vietnam War. I mean, I know about the Vietnam War, but I really gotta know about the Vietnam War. Anyways, till next time, guys, I’m Abigoliah.
Tom: I’m Tom. Cheerio.
Abigoliah: Bye-bye.