Newzoids Spoofs Nigel Farage

These are a couple of videos from ITV’s satirical puppet show, Newzoids. The show’s a mixture of puppetry and CGI animation. It was billed as the 21st century’s successor to the classic Spitting Image. They were seriously considering bringing that series back, but the idea was dropped because the series would simply have been too expensive given inflation, lower production expenditure and advertising revenue, and stricter health and safety legislation. For the latter, Fluck and Law, the creators of the puppets used in the series, expressed amazement at the relative disregard they had for proper safety standards when they were using highly toxic and flammable materials.

The puppets used in Newzoids are rather different to those in Spitting Image. They’re less complex, rubber hand puppets and more like solid, wooden figurines moved by sticks. Or at least, that’s the image the animation gives.

The satire, though, is still very sharp. In this sketch, Nigel Farage is shown as a Bernard Manning-style stand up club comedian, railing and sneering about immigrants. The crowd heckles him, reminding him of how false and hypocritical his claims are, and that he’s actually a millionaire banker with a foreign wife.

I found the second sketch below on the SlatUKIP page. It shows the Purple Duce again as an actor, though this time he’s a vaudeville comedian singing a song about how he’s really an ordinary British bloke. All the while, his alter ego is reminding him that he’s actually a millionaire, with a very expensive education, a German wife, and far from being British, he’s actually French Huguenot in ancestry.

Tags: Animation, Bernard Manning, CGI, Fluck and Law, Huguenots, Immigration, ITV, Millionaire Bankers, Newzoids, Nigel Farage, Private Education, Puppets, racism, Satire, SlatUKIP, Spitting Image, UKIP, Vaudeville