The new Spitting Image has plenty of material to work with

Will the public be up for watching the madness of 2020 unfold all over again, asks Charlotte Cripps

The series will feature a Duke of York puppet (BritBox/Avalon/PA)

Spitting Image is set to return later this year with “scandalous scripts” after a 24-year hiatus.

The new puppets include Dominic Cummings (the PM’s chief adviser) in his trademark hoodie, Boris Johnson with a mop of blond hair, and a sweaty Prince Andrew,

Greta Thunberg, the climate crisis activist, is satirised as a “roving reporter giving regular weather updates”.

The new series will air in the autumn on BritBox – the streaming service created by ITV and BBC that costs subscribers £5.99 a month.

Others to be lampooned include Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Bernie Sanders, and Elon Musk.

But do we really want to relive the past year? Do we really need a new Spitting Image to hammer home the point that we are living in crazy times?

This week alone, court documents claimed that Prince Andrew used a Spitting Image puppet of himself to grope Virginia Roberts and another woman in Jeffrey Epstein’s New York home, despite the royal categorically denying all allegations against him.

In other news this week, Donald Trump claimed in an interview with HBO that he is doing an “incredible job” fighting the coronavirus pandemic, which is raging out of control in the US, and argued with a reporter over Covid-19 death figures.

Nobody will forget Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle during lockdown to “test his eyesight”.

One thing is clear – real global events make life very easy for the Spitting Image scriptwriters.

Whether the public will be up for watching the madness unfold all over again is a different question.

BritBox may be “looking forward to enticing new subscribers with the new series” but some of us might be more inclined to pay not to watch it.

Yours,

Charlotte Cripps

Culture writer