Friday 1 February 2019

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (2 February 1986)


 This must be the week after the Westland debate, and you get the sense of that story having petered out with no new news to replace it save for a skiing holiday for Charles and Diana. The cabinet sketch even ends with a swivel-eyed camouflage-jacketed Hestletine announcing that "I'm going to walk out again!"
 The only two things that I could remember from this one were "Nippon - They don't half bugger up the British car industry" and the making of Desmond Wilcox's fly-on-the-wall documentary series The Voyeur. This week's puppets that I didn't remember them doing were Max Bygraves and John Craven.
 Perhaps the best moment is the bit that shows the most teeth - a rendering of 'Jerusalem' with tableaux of the Conservative government enacting various Victorian values. Mrs Thatcher as Queen Victoria figure daintily drinking tea while pith helmeted soldiers fire machine guns as the song goes, "I shall not halt with my great plan/ no matter how insane it seems/ till we have built Jerusalem/ and made it look like Milton Keynes"; Health Secretary Norman Fowler is a sawbones surgeon; a top-hatted Cecil Parkinson turns away a wronged mother and child into the snow, etc., although the images do zip past in rather too quick succession to register as much as they might.

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