As Spitting Image hits 40, is political satire having a midlife crisis?

There are good reasons why the popular puppet sketch show is no more, says James Moore. In its heyday, it was unencumbered by the hypersensitivity that now blunts comedy – and, besides, our politicians are more than capable of satirising themselves

Spitting Image depicted Margaret Thatcher as a psychotic, tyrannical bully (PA)

You want to make your Gen X friends feel really old? Tell them it’s 40 years since the first episode of Spitting Image. Then watch them go misty-eyed for ‘The Chicken Song’.

As soon as it launched in February 1984, the Sunday night satirical sketch show – which featured a parade of grotesque Latex caricatures of newsmakers and celebrities, their voices provided by impressionists – became a cultural landmark. One of the most watched programmes of the 1980s, it was avidly discussed in the school playground on the Monday morning.

More than the lampooned politicians which gave the show its edge, it was the celebrities of the day – Cilla Black, Terry Wogan, Esther Rantzen, Steve Davis, Richard Branson, the entire royal family – that got the most recall among my schoolmates. Just about everyone attempted to imitate the sports commentator David Coleman, mostly very badly. I don’t recall anyone’s impression being “quite remarkable”.

Today, some might struggle to believe the fuss that was created by the Queen Mother being depicted as a gin-soaked gambling addict with a Beryl Reid voice, and Fergie, then the Duchess of York, with horsey teeth amid a mane of frizzy ginger hair.

In the summer of 1986, everyone sang ‘The Chicken Song’ (“Hold a chicken in the air, stick a deckchair up your nose…”), a parody of those interminable holiday songs, like ‘Agadoo’ and ‘Do the Conga’, that were a fixture of the 80s pop charts. When the record-buying public propelled it to number one, it was a job to know who the joke was on.

But it was its lampooning of politicians for which Spitting Image is rightly revered. This was an era before social media. Today, where an ministerial gaffe can go round the world before the right honourable has got his trousers back on, only puppet-makers Fluck and Law has the reach and power to reshape the public’s perception of our lawmakers.

Their satire was largely unencumbered by the hypersensitivity that blunts much of comedy today. Last year, Spitting Image impressionist Alastair McGowan, who did the voices for Douglas Hurd, Michael Heseltine and Prince Charles, among others) complained that younger generations today simply “don't get” impressions.

Politicians on the receiving end had to at least pretend to take the mockery in good part. Margaret Thatcher, who had long curated her ‘Iron Lady’ image, was probably unharmed by her depiction as a psychotic, tyrannical bully. This was little more than an extension of what most people already thought about her: watching her swivel-eyed recollections in Thatcher: The Downing Street Years, the BBC documentary that aired in 1993 after her ousting, one was left asking whether it was life imitating art or art imitating life.

Norman Tebbit being spoofed as a leather-clad skinhead, always ready to knock the teeth out of anyone who incurred her displeasure – mostly from her rabble of a cabinet – only helped his day-to-day role as party chairman.

But Neil Kinnock’s depiction as a windbag and ineffective party leader was harder for him to live down.

“So, tell me, Mr Pillock,” says Fidel Castro in an episode broadcast in 1984, “what is it you do exactly?”

“I’m the leader of the Labour Party in Britain.”

“In my country, we don’t have a political opposition.”

“No, nor do we…”

Then there was Labour’s deputy leader Roy Hattersley, who was portrayed with a constantly dribble – his puppet, by his own admission, putting the spit in Spitting Image.

But if all that was less than helpful for a party aspiring to govern, the SDP/Liberal Alliance had it even worse. The leader of the Liberal half – David Steel – was depicted as a squeaky voiced pixie who lived in the top pocket of smoothie SDP leader, David Owen.

Then there was Ronald Reagan, starring in his very own multi-episode storyline, called “The President’s Brain is Missing”, where his brain escapes from the White House. It was often hard to think of these politicians in any other way. Spitting Image acted as a kind of anti-PR firm for anyone in power or seeking it.

I can’t help thinking that something like it might be useful today – and our current Houses of Parliament would certainly deserve it. What we have today is a mixture of politicians who could either be coloured grey, as John Major’s puppet was (Sunak, Starmer), or are bizarre carnival characters ripe for the picking (too many examples to list).

One of the main problems satirists face when thoughts turn to reviving the show, which was cancelled in 1996, amid declining viewing figures – interestingly, at the fag-end of a long, tired, scandal-hit Tory administration… – is that, as we have witnessed in recent years, reality seems to go beyond satire: a self-defeating Brexit, the horrendous missteps of the pandemic, using our seas and rivers as a sewage overflow, trying and failing to send any asylum seekers to Rwanda, the Post Office scandal, sleazy MPs, ministerial incompetence…

As the Horizon affair shows, these days it takes a TV box-set drama rather than a sketch show to bring a political scandal to mainstream attention and get things done.

A recent failed Spitting Image reboot proved that, sometimes, reality is funnier than fiction. What’s the point of trying to lampoon Liz Truss and her 47 days in power when, on a daily basis, she does it so perfectly herself? Whether she’s cosplaying in furs aboard a heavy-duty tank while visiting troops or blaming left-wing bankers for tanking the economy after her disastrous mini-Budget, warning that the civil service has been captured by trans activists or raging against cheese, hers is a life that imitates satire.

We really need to save ourselves from people like this. Fortunately, in this post-satire world, they’re well placed to show us the error of their ways. And it’s no laughing matter.