Appropriately for a show called Spitting Image, the big question is how closely the remake resembles the original satirical latex puppet show.
The series, which was shown on ITV from 1984 to 1996, was central in the moral opposition to the longest recent period of Tory rule before the present one.
Admirers of the franchise will be relieved that the revival – launching on Saturday on the streaming service BritBox – has lost none of its savagery or willingness to shock.
One of the first images is Donald Trump’s “ass-hole”, in effect a separate character, represented by a stretched sphincter resembling a penis dipped in faeces. Prince Harry, unemployed in Los Angeles, tries to earn a buck by dressing as a Nazi. Dominic Cummings is an alien who wants to eat baby Wilfred Johnson as a snack, but even then Boris Johnson, a jibbering half-wit, dare not sack him.
BritBox is a joint venture between ITV and the BBC, so new director general Tim Davie, seeking to reduce Downing Street’s hostility towards the corporation, will have to hope that Cummings and Johnson mainly take offence at the commercial network.
There have been two huge changes in context since the puppets’ first run. One is that, with considerable historical improbability, the current political situation in the UK and the US has the feel of an extreme caricature of the Thatcher-Reagan era in which Spitting Image first flourished.
So furious is the current news cycle that the first episode was re-edited from dawn on Friday to incorporate the Trumps’ coronavirus results. It looks as if the show will cannily use Trump and Johnson tweets – able to be layered on the screen at the last minute – to keep as topical as possible.
The other shift since first time round is that society, policed by social media, is much more sensitive to offence. The show’s tactic of focusing on a prominent characteristic of a person – physical, vocal, reputational – and viciously exaggerating it runs the risk now of accusations of bigotry or shaming.
ITV has admitting to censoring the addition of carrot leaves to the red-head of singer Ed Sheeran (now, weirdly, it’s turnip fronds) in case of causing upset; but, in the earlier version, Sheeran’s puppet would likely have been completely carrot, with a side-dish of tone-deafness.
The cultural stop-it cops will be especially alert to representations of race and class.
And here the series does show some caution. Interestingly, the Priti Patel puppet is given no words ending in G, thus avoiding her distinctive way of talkin’. Patel is depicted as a dominatrix, bringing to orgasm with her rightwing opinions a Michael Gove, whose rubber cheeks are as swollen and rough as nappy-rashed buttocks.
That sketch is at least as offensive as the Thatcher-era sketches. The range of targets is also impressively broad, with New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, mocked for being too perfect a politician in a tremendous Mary Poppins spoof. Teeth, it seems, are the body-part still regarded as a safe target, with Ardern’s choppers especially whoppers.
The first show lets HRH Prince Andrew off with a bit of silly slapstick, but there are, blessedly, nine more weeks of this to come.
