Friday, 26 April 2019

A Comedy On This Day: Spitting Image (27 April 1986)



 First lines after the opening credits are: Casper Weinberger: "Mr President, what are we doing about Syria?" Ronald Reagan: "We're going in, Larry!"...

 Its 12 days after the US bombing raids on Libya, launched from RAF air bases in Britain. The note of genuine - rather than synthetic - outrage (at both Reagan's hawkishness and Britain's complicity) in the skits that refer to the event gives them a rare sense of urgency when viewed 32 years later. The highlight is a love scene at an airport between Reagan and Thatcher, with the president handing the Prime Minister a ticking bomb just before she boards her plane.

 The sketch that I remember being talked about at the time in our second form, however, is Russell Harty interviewing Samantha Fox's disembodied breasts, each of which is given a separate personality and a pert little red mouth in place of a nipple. Watched now, I'm struck by how surreally grotesque the image is, and by how it treads a fine line between satirising the commercial exploitation of a young woman and just mocking her. Unfortunately, it falls horribly on the wrong side of this line in the punch line about Fox's brain forming a double act with the breasts called Little and Large... and you realise just what a disagreeable boy's club this enterprise is sometimes.

 No new song this week, just a reprise of 'The Chicken Song' over the end credits. They've created a monster there...

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