DVD: Spitting Image – The Complete First Series
January 29, 2008
Topical satire is a tough game. One week a joke can be funny and current, the next it can either be scrubbed from the set list or ditched for fear of offending someone. However, this can be used to your advantage if you are out to be as biting, sharp and as close to the edge as you possibly can.
With grotesque rubber caricatures and the vocal talents of some of the best known impersonators around today, Spitting Image was probably the closest TV programme that truly embraced the underground alternative comedy scene of the 80s.
With incredibly close to the mark jokes that these days would see the programme taken off air pretty much before it was even commissioned, the show was a late night comedy success for ITV – a show which actively went out to target the main players in politics, showbiz and the Monarchy with little of fear or remorse.
The first series, which was originally broadcast in 1984, featured faces from the 1980’s like Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Norman Tebbit, Charles and Diana and Colonel Gaddafi in a range of sketches and skits often placing them in unusual situations or expanding on their exaggerated characteristics to make the most normal of situations amusing.
If there is one problem with this series, it is that while the main characters are easy to recognise, a lot of the smaller bit characters haven’t stood the test of time in the public memory. This means that some of the jokes fall flatter than they probably should. That said, if your memories of the 80s is of the Royal weddings, the Soviet struggles and the Conservative party, and not just of you getting your nappy changed or watching Tommy Boyd on the Wide Awake Club, this might well raise a chuckle on a cold Sunday night.
Spitting Image – The Complete First Series is available to buy from here.
[...] on from the success of the first DVD, the second series of the eighties latex-based satirical comedy that was Spitting Image gets [...]