Spitting Image: Essential satire for a generation:::

As an Arena documentary about Spitting Image airs on BBC Four, Dominic Cavendish argues that we should be fighting to get the latex puppets back

Margaret Thatcher in Spitting Image Photo: AP

 I call them the “lost generation”. Many of those reaching voting-age this year will have been born after the last episode of Spitting Image aired on February 18th 1996. These tragic teens have emerged into political consciousness in the absence of the finest and funniest TV satire series this country has ever seen. What hope can the poor lambs have of being clued up about who’s running the show and pulling the strings?

OK, I jest. A bit. But the commemoration this week of the 30th anniversary of Spitting Image’s first broadcast on February 26th 1984 brings home not only how instructive and entertaining it consistently was but what a wilderness followed its departure.

True, Have I Got News for You continues to rumble on – 23 years it’s been going. Mock the Week makes useful topical swipes. And in the digital sphere, abundant Twitter gags and viral YouTube pranks such as the 2012 Nick Clegg Apology Song suggest that the masses are newly empowered to cock a snook at their “masters”. Yet ITV’s Spitting Image garnered audiences of millions, aimed to rally the widest constituency on mainstream terrestrial TV and could be truly, madly, memorably horrible.

Blessed with Peter Fluck and Roger Law’s ingeniously cruel caricature puppets, it combined knockabout Punch and Judy visuals with gobby verbals. It refused to treat its audience as dummies, reacting quickly and cleverly to the news. And while it was unafraid of the richest, most famous and powerful – even making contentious fun of the Royal Family - it didn’t baulk at shining a light on the lesser-known for fear of seeming obscure. Indeed obscurity could even become a running-gag – witness the damning representation of Employment Secretary (1983-85) Tom King as “The Invisible Man”.

It understood that by making the shadowy souls at Westminster celebrities you could better hold them to account. As well as providing a leg-up for impressionists and comedians who went on to greater things - among them Steve Coogan, Harry Enfield, Alistair McGowan and Jan Ravens – it gave the viewers a basic grounding in the personalities and policies of the day.
It’s a shame that not all the series have been released on DVD because it serves now as a fascinating documentary of its times and considering its fast turn-around, exhausting to produce by all accounts, many of the sketches still hold good. Though it kicked off in the now far-gone, nuclear Armageddon-shadowed days of the Cold War, portraying the White House as being run by a President Reagan capable of functioning without a brain and the Kremlin as ruled by a succession of moribund old men with identikit heavy eyebrows, its lasting virtues were apparent from the start.
Although viewing figures had declined by the time the show shut up shop, if you watch the final episode, it’s astonishing how ahead of the game it still seems.
Who’d have thought that its futuristic “prophecy” of Jeremy Clarkson in old age, presenting a Top Gear spoof called Staying in Second Gear, would look fresh-minted today? And it induces a pang of what-might-have-been to see the team so ably sharpening their knives at the prospect of a New Labour landslide. How the nation might have found solace in the grotesque embodiment of Peter Mandelson as a snake as his spin-machine coiled itself ever tighter round the apparatus of government.
There’s something enduringly inspired, too, about showing Tony Blair as hiding a portrait in his attic, Dorian Gray-style, in which lurk all the dark, left-wing sides of his personality. Considering what a field-day the team had with the first Gulf War, what followed 9/11 would have afforded a rich seam of satire too – a puppet of Osama bin Laden was made, apparently, but never got used.
Did the show inflict real-world damage? It must have done: on the credibility of the torrentially spitting Roy Hattersley, Shadow Chancellor in the mid-Eighties, on the influence of Liberal Party leader David Steel (depicted as the pip-squeak sidekick to SDP leader David Owen) and most of all on John Major, lent a permanent, deathly-dull pallor of grey. While sceptics often point to three general election wins as proof that Thatcher’s critics didn’t turn the public against her, by 1990 you had the disconcerting end-of-Animal Farm sense of turning from politician to puppet and not knowing which was which – you could say that she became her own worst parody.
Did Spitting Image create a climate in which it became unacceptable to vote Tory? It’s worth arguing. Had it continued might it have made the failings of the Blair/ Brown pact more apparent to more people sooner? I'd say so. Don’t Clegg, Cameron and Miliband unite in relief that they’re safe from its unflattering gaze? They must do. And what would the Spitting Image lot have made of Nigel Farage, Alex Salmond and Vladimir Putin? It's fun to picture that.
Such matters will no doubt be discussed when a number of those bound up with the Spitting Image story convene at the BFI on Thursday evening following a preview screening of a forthcoming BBC4 Arena documentary about the show – among them Thatcher impersonator Steve Nallon, Ian Hislop, Harry Enfield and Lords Hattersley and Steel.
But the key question is should we all be fighting tooth and claw to get it, or something very like it, back?