‘Spitting Image’ Returning on BritBox

I found this promising little snippet in today’s I for 5th August 2020. It seems that satirical puppet show, Spitting Image, will be returning to TV after nearly a quarter of a century. The article runs

Johnson’s ‘Spitting Image’ revealed

Boris Johnson, his chief adviser Dominic Cummings and the Duke of York feature among the latest Spitting Image puppets unveiled ahead of the show’s return;. The satirical series will air later this year on BritBox after running on ITV for 18 series between 1984 and 1996. Donald Trump, Beyonce, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and Vladimir Putin will also feature prominently.

There were plans to bring it back a few years ago following a retrospective on the programme as long ago as 2004, I believe. Channel 4 looked into it, but turned it down because it would be too expensive. Health and Safety legislation also meant that the conditions in which the puppets were made back in the ’80s and ’90s, which did use dangerous chemicals, would be illegal and need to be improved. In the meantime, we briefly had Newzoids on ITV, which also mixed puppets and CGI to satirise politicos and celebs, but was obviously cheaper.

I thought, however, that Britbox was a streaming service for oldshows broadcast by the Beeb and ITV. This suggests that they aren’t just showing re-runs, but have commissioned new material. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.

And to see if the new, revived Spitting Image is as vicious, incisive and hilarious at its previous incarnation.

Newzoids: Trump Sings ‘Pratt Out Of Hell’

After Donald Trump’s latest misogynist comment about grabbing women by their private parts, and the attempt by the Fuhrage to explain it away as simple alpha male speech – which only makes it worse, when you think about it – the satirical ITV puppet show, Newzoids, parodied him as Meatloaf, singing ‘Pratt out of Hell’. He also sings a line from one of Meatloaf’s other hits, rendered as ‘I would do anything for votes’. But he lives out ‘but I won’t do that’, as obviously, there’s precious little that Trump won’t do for votes.

He’s also got a chorus of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton and Obama, who are quite horrific warmongers in their own right, though the parody doesn’t cover their wars of terror in aid of compliant Fascist dictatorships. This may well be because Hillary has corporate backing, while Trump doesn’t.

Even so, this is hilarious, and recalls some of the best musical parodies by the late, lamented Spitting Image. Enjoy!

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.