The Return of Spitting Image

I hear rumors of it’s return! Plenty of current-day fodder for the puppeteers and voice artistes to get their teeth into, so to speak.....

I wonder who the modern day Paxo, Burnet and Tebbits will be!

Why do I recall Tom Lehrer here?
"When Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, political satire was dead"......

I don't know about anyone else, but I really don't have the appetite to see a lot of today's 'political characters' on screen more than I absolutely need to.

Bad Idea let it go. We don’t need to raise the political temperature any higher than it presently is.

The return of Spitting Image comes round every so often and nothing ever comes of it, and of course in recent years we've had three attempts at a "new Spitting Image" in the shape of 2DTV, Headcases and Newzoids, all of which have flopped. In many ways the idea of bringing back Spitting Image is why they're flopping anyway, because they've all been commissioned as a puppet/animation show with comedy rather than a comedy show which happens to use puppets/animation.

When Martin Lambie-Nairn came up with the idea of Spitting Image ("based on an original lunch by..."), the idea was not that he wanted a puppet show. He wanted something that would parody and undermine the pomposity of politicians - based on him seeing how they appeared on and off-camera when he was doing the graphics for Weekend World - and it was only after thinking about if for a while that he decided that the best way to do that would be with puppets, at which point he approached Fluck and Law who'd been making models for adverts and magazines. There was a reason for it to exist, because that was considered the best way to present the material.

And that's what's been missing from all the facsimile shows since, they've been devised as puppet/animation shows first and comedy shows later, so they're not funny enough. When Spitting Image was in its pomp, it wasn't popular because it was a puppet show, it was popular because it was hugely anarchic and funny and savage and took the piss out of everything. It just so happened that they did it with puppets.

There's a fascinating bit in Tooth and Claw, the book about the making of Spitting Image, which discusses the difference in opinions between the two original producers John Lloyd and Tony Hendra. Lloyd thought that the gags should always come first so they'd make the puppets based on what jokes they wanted to do and then when they'd done all the jokes and they weren't funny anymore, they'd melt them down. But Tony Hendra wanted to have a number of recurring puppets who would appear every week regardless and be given their own characteristics and, in effect, "made funny". And it was the Hendra approach they started with and it flopped because it was boring and the novelty of the puppets wore off after five minutes, and it wasn't until Hendra left and Lloyd was in complete charge and did it his way that it took off.

Yet 2DTV, Headcases and Newzoids have all appeared to take on the Hendra approach, where the puppets come first regardless of whether they've got anything funny to do with them. So Newzoids clearly decided "We need to have a May puppet, we need to have a Trump puppet", and that was what led the show rather than what might actually be worth talking about, so you would get a load of recurring sketches of hugely variable quality, like "Despicable May", because you had a Theresa May puppet and you had to use it every week.

So to my mind, if you're thinking "We should bring back Spitting Image because we should have a show like that now", you're already going wrong because you've decided it has to be puppets regardless of what the writing's like. You should be thinking "We should have a show with the same attitude and style as Spitting Image using whatever format would be the best fit for the material".

It's like how Viz was a big success and all the other adult comics around the same time weren't - because Viz was the only funny one. It wasn't successful just because it was an adult comic. The novelty of that wears off in five minutes.

So no, I don't think they should bring back Spitting Image. They should do something with the same attitude as Spitting Image that makes an impact now, not harking back to what worked 35 years ago.

I'll believe it when I see it. There were rumours of it returning in America but nothing's come of that so far.

At the end of the day, the show was in its prime when there was no social media, politicians weren't as open with their personalities so the writers had room to play, and most of the time any satirical jokes have been plastered all over Twitter within minutes of whatever event has happened. Satire on television is much harder and much less effective nowadays.

I know it wasn't written by the same people, but when the likes of Newzoids resort to Boris Johnson singing Beyonce or whatever it was they did, it says it all really.

The other problem is that there's such a small pool of topical comedy writers so any show always uses the same people. So with Newzoids you just ended up with Dead Ringers but with pictures, because it was all the same writers (and impressionists) as Dead Ringers.

That Beyonce thing is the perfect example of what I was suggesting up there, rather than any great satirical imperative, it just becomes "We've got a Boris puppet, what are we going to do with it?" and having to come up with incredibly contrived scenarios to use them (and probably also the thought "we've got to have a comedy song because topical comedy shows always end with a comedy song").

We need people to be doing topical comedy because they actually give a toss about the news and have things they want to say, not just for the sake of it. Otherwise there's no point.

I think it's a little harsh to call 2DTV a flop, it got five series after all and was reasonably popular early on. Compared to Spitting Image, it's a short run of course!

I always think 2DTV over stretched itself by going from 10 minutes to 30, and thus the gag rate wasn't as high - linking back to the points in your otherwise enlightening post.

Agree, this revival rumour is one that does the rounds every so often (Blackadder is another) - purely as someone who used to work on it said they'd be up for it coming back in theory, rather than anything based in reality.

Isn’t the cost of making Spitting Image is what makes it unlikely to return. It was expensive to make in its heyday and I think broadcasters probably wouldn’t want to spend so much on a comedy that has very little repeat or international sales value.

I think the irrationality brought on by the Twitter age makes it difficult for proper satirists to do their job. As a result we have left-wing comedians appeasing left-wing audiences by saying how bad the right are, and vice versa. I've always felt good satire shouldn't take sides by default.

Jonathan Pie is a prime example. Tom Walker, the guy who plays him, identifies as left wing but he'll willingly attack the left just as ruthlessly as he does the right when he needs to. As a result, going by what's said on Twitter, people on the right think he's a loony lefty, and people on the left think he's a fascist.

Hard to satirise politics when the current situation is beyond satire.

If Jonathan Pie was around in the late 1930's his act would be "yeah, Hitler is awul BUT the other side is just as bad. Everything went to hell when these snowflakes started getting offended by everything and refused to listen to other people's opinions".