Spitting Image

For 12 years Spitting Image flew the flag for satire at ITV, with Fluck and Law's rubber caricatures brought to life by skilful puppeteers and made eerily real by masterful voice artists. On Friday 9 December 2005 we welcomed on-stage a panel of the movers and shakers behind the show (including producer John Lloyd) who recalled the highlights, remembered the controversies and introduced some the most memorable footage from the series.

[The beginning of this interview has been lost. We apologise for any inconvenience caused ]

Peter Fluck : ... the idea of those was when they were photographed and then printed in the magazine, something was added: colour, perspective, lighting... and that was quite a flexible stage and it worked very well, and it made a different impact on the page than drawings previously had done. But since we were working in three dimensions... we worked for the press all over the world, we did some good stuff and we worked for some good magazines.

I think one thing that made us think of going into television was that it was the beginning of Rupert Murdoch's reign over the press and it soon became quite clear that magazines like The Sunday Times, who did actually used to use an awful lot of good writers, weren't carrying so much interest in journalism, which weakened our position, and so when it was suggested that it might be possible to turn them - the caricatures - it might be possible to turn them into puppets for television, we just jumped at the idea. Naïvely of course but... we did.

Jeremy Dyson: And the show, one thing I always remember vividly about the show is it used to in the same credits have that same joke every week: 'from an original lunch by Martin Lambie-Nairn,' but that's true, isn't it? It did...

PF: I don't remember the lunch actually. I remember Martin Lambie-Nairn. [laughter]

JD: Who was Martin Lambie-Nairn?

PF: Martin Lambie-Nairn with his firm Robinson Lambie-Nairn were the people who first came to prominence by creating the Channel Four '4', which was... do you remember the... bricks and things in it?

JD: Oh yes.

PF: For some reason, someone said to him 'wouldn't it be wonderful to have a political satire show using puppets', and he mentioned it to somebody who asked somebody else who said 'well, I know these guys Peter Fluck and Roger Law, why don't you talk to them?' It was really as simple as that. And they initially came in as, we thought, people who would raise the money and do all the bits that we weren't capable of doing. In fact it didn't turn out to be true.

JD: And when did you come on board, John? When was your involvement from...?

John Lloyd: About five years before that. [laughter] I... 'based on an original lunch by Martin Lambie-Nairn' was my idea as revenge for the fact when people used to say 'was Spitting Image your idea?' I'd have to go 'no.' But I did Not the Nine O'clock News before that and I was a radio producer, so we had lots and lots of brilliant voice people and nobody looked anything like the people we intended to mock, and so we had the same idea of puppets and I'd seen Peter and Roger's work and I went to see them... particularly Roger and said 'could you build some puppets for us?'

He said 'I don't know how to build puppets. Fuck off!' I think he said, probably. And then I said 'well, there's £200 in it for you' and he just laughed. So we went away and got somebody else to do it, a BBC prop-maker and they were really awful. They only lasted two episodes. So several years later I heard that Martin had put up the money for it, and then Clive Sinclair, wasn't it? The man with the C5... Peter?

PF: Yeah, we approached him. We worked in Cambridge and Clive Sinclair was very prominent - working there as the inventor of the things we call computers - and he put an important amount of money in, a first tranche of what was going to be more but I think his accountant advised him to back out, but by that time we did have something which looked as if it might be finance-able by somebody else.

JD: So how long did it take to go then from having the sculptures and being at that point to actually having...

PF: I think it took about two and a half years or even more.

JD: Before... and did you do a pilot or...?

JL: Yeah, we did two pilots actually. One of which a very young Ben Elton was a key writer of. We just thought he was going on how marvellous it was, but by the time we got round to making it he was already starting to be well known in his own right. But it was a long time and I probably came... actually got seriously involved a year - more than a year after you'd started, I think...

PF: Yeah.

JL: ...Peter, you were trying to make puppets and they were going a very high-tech route, trying to do sort of King Kong about 25 years too early. And there were lots of servomotors and Peter would be... this whirring noise that would come and a puppet would go 'neeee...' and you'd say 'this is exciting the way it goes neeee like that.' And then at quite an early stage Peter had this brilliant thing... he went to Smiths and bought lots of those typing thimbles, you know? Those things you use for collating papers, those orange pimply things? And that was the grip inside the puppet's head, and I remember that being the sort of first idea that low technology was the way to go. And so we... yeah we made these pilots, and originally we hawked around a set of your postcards, I remember, we went to all the ITV companies saying 'we've got this great postcard here that could well be an amazing satire show' and let everybody... just showed us the door.

PF: If anybody could find the technology... The difficulty in finding the technology was that all the people who had skills in the film business were the only ones we could approach. A puppet for film is a completely different thing from a television puppet, because for a film you just need the take that you need. With a puppet for television, hopefully you can use it on a programme, put it back into storage, bring it out again and it would last for some time. So the technology had to be very, very simple. And so, in fact, I think we ended up ripping off The Muppets really.

JD: I was going to say, were there any precedents that you had in mind for this kind of show because it struck me the thing about Spitting Image was that it was a completely original show, which is very, very rare in television.

JL: No, I think one of the worst, most horrible things that... the Autumn before... well, Summer, August before we were due to start in January, when everyone was... complete panic, we were working in Docklands and our office actually... under what is now Canary Wharf Tower, if you can imagine it. When we first went there, there wasn't even a road it was so primitive. And so we were working there and Roger and I decided to go to the Edinburgh Festival because Jim Henson's talking about making puppets and we're going to learn from the feet of the master because The Muppets was enormous. And so Jim gets up and the first thing he says 'I just want to say the first thing to say about puppets is never, ever do human beings.' [laughter] That was a horrible, horrible moment.

JD: And talking of puppets, Louise, when did you... were you there from the beginning?

Louise Gold: I got involved fairly early on. Jon Blair, I think, contacted me because I'd worked with The Muppets and they said 'come and join us and be Jim Henson.' I thought I couldn't do that in a million, trillion years but I was sort of advising and trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about in the puppet field. And being absolutely terrified because the puppets were designed very much as caricatures rather than as things that people could manipulate. [laughter] And as the series went on and they got larger and larger, and less easy to manipulate, didn't they, Peter?

PF: Yes, I think they did.

JD: I think on that note, let's go into our first clips package so we can see what we're talking about. If that's all right.

[clips]

LG: That was mad.

JD: It's actually quite shocking to see Diana treated - retrospectively - treated in that way. Which brings me onto something... what you did to Royalty because at that time... before that you weren't allowed to do anything like that with Royalty. The Goodies used to get into trouble for doing the slightest little Royal joke.

JL: I think you had to... if you did the Queen, I think you always had to call her the Duchess of Britain or something like that, you weren't allowed to say it was her. So that was certainly a taboo we broke through. But as everybody knows, subsequently what we... it was kind of lame, we used to say if that sketch was about a family called The Smiths where, you know, Auntie Maggie drinks a bit too much and Grannie sounds like a charlady you wouldn't think twice. It's only because it's the Royal Family. When you think what they've been up to since... you know, we were quite tame really, I suppose.

JD: And did you... something that occurred to me, at the time, was that you kind of made them strangely likable, in a way. I mean was that... obviously that wasn't your intention but...

JL: That wasn't the intention, indeed, because you're trying to get there by stealth, to get on air because the first... do you remember the very first episode? Charlie Denton, who'd commissioned the show and our great hero came in and he said 'I've just been talking to the Board of Governors and I'm afraid you've got to remove every single reference to the Royal Family from the first show.' And I said 'but there's six minutes, at least six minutes, seven minutes of Royal Family jokes.' And he said 'well, I'm sorry, that's the... I don't agree with it, here's a bottle of whiskey'... you've got to decide what to do, do you take the stuff out and carry on next week, because I'm sure it will be fine if you do what you're told or do you resign and nobody ever hear of Spitting Image again?

So we sat and the five of us: me and Fluckie and Blair and Tony Hendra, the other producer, argued for about two hours and eventually the consensus was we'd give it another go. We took out all these references. We couldn't understand why they were so sensitive about it. And then we discovered that Prince Philip had been invited to open the new Central Studios at Nottingham the following week and they didn't want to upset him. So he came and opened the Nottingham studios and cut the ribbon and then they put all the sketches back in the next week. [laughter] It was rude, wasn't it, really?

PF: Shocking. But the way they were portrayed actually really fitted with the way that their publicity was beginning to be shaped. It was quite... they were quite purposely presented to the nation as a... not a posh aristocratic family but a quiet, rather boring, sleepy, little middle-class family. It was an image they worked on.

JD: But do you... did Spitting Image have anything to do with what subsequently happened to them, with the kind of downgrading of them? Because you'd never... it must have done because you'd never see them presented in that way before.

PF: Well it made everyone laugh.

JD: Steve, you as...

JL: Do your Queen Mother Steve, come on, let's have a laugh.

JD: Did you do the Queen Mother?

Steve Nallon: Well, it's an interesting thing though, because, I don't know if you remember this but we... Jan Ravens originally did the voice of the Queen Mother...

PF: It was a stoke of genius to do it as Beryl Reid.

SN: Well, what happened was, John came up to me at the beginning of a series, I can't remember which one, and said 'have you got any new voices?' And I said 'yes, I've developed Beryl Reid' [laughter] and he said 'that's a lot of use, isn't it.' [laughter] And I said 'no, no, I think that what...' I had this idea that we could take the Beryl Reid voice because she was exactly the same age as the Queen Mother and Beryl Reid used to have this wonderful character she did in the music hall called Marleen, that was based on the stage doorkeeper at the Birmingham Alexander.' So that's why, you see, she ended up sounding like a charlady. [laughter] we used to like the Queen Mother... we used to have a Grant and Naylor who were good for lines, I remember one: 'I can't go out today, because between eleven and twelve I've got to be a credit to the nation.' [laughter] It was a great line.

JD: But what's brilliant... what Spitting Image used to do wonderfully well was that you were taking something real, a little fragment of something - she was known as this woman of the people, particularly in the war, that myth about her...

SN: That she was known... absolutely. And also nobody really knew what she sounded like because she never, ever made a speech in public. She hadn't made a speech to a journalist since 1935. So she'd never spoken. I think you had a wonderful line though, didn't you, because there was this big argument. When I wasn't doing the voice - it was Jan originally - when there was a big scandal about whether or not the Queen Mother would appear on the show and how awful the puppet would be - and I think you said that what we should actually have done was send a close-up of the Queen Mother's teeth on... which was even more disgusting than the puppet.

JD: Can I just ask the technical question of how it worked with the voice and the puppet. Did you used to stand off-camera?

SN: Well, what used... originally when I first... on the first - not the pilot but the first series - there was myself and Chris Barrie , and the idea was essentially to train Chris and I to do puppets, with Louise and Anthony Asbury who also did - the American Puppeteer - who did a lot of the voices. And because of the way the show was made, i.e. literally made with the sets - bang, bang, bang, bang, bang in the studio - it was impossible to do the voices and the puppets live. So then we started pre-recording them and it made life easier when we started doing that. And Chris and I actually stayed puppeteers for quite a few series as well.

JL: The... we tried... you learn from what went before - famously the first cars, apparently didn't have steering wheels, they had reigns because, you know, people, obviously they had a motor but they had reigns, and they say the first aeroplanes used to have steering wheels instead of joysticks - we used to borrow all the things that the Muppets did and what the Muppets did, of course is that the puppeteers would also do the voices. And so, you know, Kermit was done by the person who operated him, it makes it much more sensible.

But when you're doing impressions, you know, if you're a brilliant puppeteer, it's most unlikely you're also a brilliant impressionist. So what you tend to have is - saving anybody's blushes - but people tended to be one or the other, so that you'd have great voices with not very good puppeteering skills and also great puppeteers who couldn't really do voices. And the more we split them up the better they became and it was a tree. So Louise always used to do the Queen, because she was actually doing the Queen's voice. And Anthony would always do the Pope, but by and large it was all done to a track.

SN: Well, the Pope was interesting because I did what would be the Polish Pope who spoke incredibly slowly, this... 'it... is... important... to... realise... that... the...' and of course the problem with a puppet is that you can't keep it alive. And I don't remember how this happened but we had this guy called Anthony Asbury - this American puppeteer - and I did the 'official' Pope and the American puppeteer did the voice of the 'private' Pope. So that's why the Pope... am I remembering correctly?

JL: That's right. He was a Texan, wasn't he?

SN: He was a Texan.

JL: It was another touch of satire based on the real world.

SN: It was based on the real world, and it worked. And suddenly... because the Pope was flying round the world, kissing the ground wherever he went... it just sort of fitted.

JL: ... a special vehicle and everything.

SN: ... a special Popemobile and all that sort of thing.

JL: I loved it when he played the banjo...

JD: And Louise, did you find yourself, like with the Queen, doing the same puppets, did you... in the way that a voice artist would have the voices and...

LG: Well, strangely enough I got to do a lot of the female puppets... but one interesting thing that I remember: Steve used to do the voice of Thatcher and I used to work the puppet, and when I left, Anthony Asbury took over doing Thatcher, and that was when she started dressing in male clothing [laughter]. It was an aspect of her personality, but it was when a male puppeteer was doing it.

SN: As an American, he thought it would be funny to dress Thatcher up as Churchill, and I think it was his idea, if I remember correctly. Was it his idea?

JL: I think it was - the cigar and everything.

JD: Another brilliant... we'll come to that clip - the famous clip - later. Actually, let's have some more clips and hopefully Mrs Thatcher will figure, because there's lots of questions about her.

[clips]

JD: one of the things, actually, that made the 80s bearable for me, growing up, was... I had a huge fear of Reagan because of nuclear war, which we all did then, and a similar fear of Thatcher, and it somehow made then dealable with, because they became loveable, in a way.

PF: Well, actually, John Gummer said exactly that to me. He said 'actually, you're doing her a great service, you may not realise this, but you're doing her a great service, because you are making her...' she wasn't known for her sense of humour... and actually, by allowing her to be laughed at in such a clear way... I was never quite sure about what the argument was, but that was his argument, that actually it didn't do her any harm.

JL: I think it was a safety valve. You've got to remember that in the early 80s you had the riots in Toxteth and Brixton, the country was extremely cross. If it hadn't been for the Falklands War, there probably would have been, might easily have been a revolution. You think in the Winter of Discontent, under Callaghan and so on, the country was seething, completely controlled by very militant unions. I didn't think that Mrs Thatcher was going to last a year and a half, personally. And I think Spitting Image helped... truly, in retrospect...

LG: We kept her in power...

JL: ... keep her in power, by creating a safety valve. The thing is, Louise, you didn't come to the office much, but I used to get piles of letters every week and they would divide into essentially two kinds: 'you are a communist bastard, why don't you go and live in Russia, I hope you die and get cancer...' and the other ones were 'I was going to kill myself on Saturday, but I thought I'd have just one good laugh before I go, because I've been unemployed for fifteen years and I can't stand it. And it was so funny on Sunday I thought I'd wait another week...' [laughter] And it really was two piles of stuff, and I think it is a very British thing, you get very cross about what the government's doing about the Poll Tax, for example, it used to make people absolutely furious, and then you have a laugh, and you think 'oh it's all right...' Especially, the more vicious we got, bashing her over the head with a rubber truncheon and belittling her and so on, I think it's...

PF: We could have called ourselves The ENSA Show, couldn't we?

JL: We the loyal Opposition.

JD: That's what it felt like, very much. I remember the '87 election, the special... 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' and that was literally the... it was simultaneously chilling, but also it was the only comfort, because you thought 'it's not just me that feels like this', the fact that you did that.

JL: The day that Roger Law threw a sofa at me, for suggesting we should have a balanced view towards the miners' strike, as a BBC-trained person, and he said 'no, I don't think we should have a balanced attitude, I think we should support the miners, because nobody else is. Only us or Channel Four News put anything like the miners' case and we should.' And that's very touching... at least somebody's putting the other side.

JD: Steve, am I right in thinking there were different voices for Thatcher over...

SN: Well in the very early days of Spitting Image, which is '84, she still had a very high voice, which she later dropped, so 'in the very early days, it was very high... and very slow.' [laughter] 'And then as the years went on... the voice got much more deep and much lower...' And of course the other thing that happened on Spitting Image, that hadn't been happening in the 1970s and 80s, with other people doing the voice, was that we had the opportunity of doing her in Parliament. And therefore the voice for that was totally different: 'The Right Honourable Gentleman doesn't understand the nature of fiscal policy. If he did, then he would understand that the Conservative...' And actually it was that voice that then began to feed into the whole personality of Thatcher, and it was that voice that I tended to use from then on in, I think, on the whole...

JL: I must just tell this story, Steve... in this time we were trying to decide who could do voices and who could do stuff, I had this postcard from this guy called Steve Nallon in Birmingham, saying that he did a Mrs Thatcher impression. I thought, yeah, this is some terrible sad person... [laughter] and in comes this... I'm very busy, trying to do all this paperwork, and I say 'so I understand you do a Thatcher impression, would you mind doing it for me now?' And he said...

SN: I said I wouldn't do it because... I got you to ask me a question...

JL: Oh that's right, that's right. I said 'Mrs Thatcher, what is your attitude to current government economic policy?'

SN: 'Well, of course under Blair it's wrong, and I think it must be instantly said that you know, under my government...' and that's how I did it, I think.

JL: You stood up and you hectored me... [laughter] That reminded me, that voice he uses for Parliament... it was like 'oh, my God...' I couldn't believe it, it was like she was in the room.

SN: 'I remember at the time I also added Roy Hattersley...' [laughter] '... to it, which was rather jolly to do...' [laughter] '... and I have a strong inclination that I also remember doing Enoch Powell...' [laughter] '... for those of you old enough to remember... Mr Powell.'

JL: This illustrates something really, really interesting about Spitting Image. A lot of us, particularly the script side, used to get very hurt about the fact that 'the puppets are so brilliant, if only the rest of the show was any good. The scripts are terrible, everything else is terrible...' You say 'actually it's the other way round.' The puppets are brilliant, but they so draw the eye that you don't realise how good the voices were.

You can just see, when he's... he's not even got a... I'm just operating from here. And the thing about Spitting Image... it was a very rich experience. I know that it looks a bit tatty and aged now, but there's so much going on in it, and a very interesting thing happened... I had a letter from a blind woman, who said 'I don't understand why people say that Spitting Image puppets are great but the scripts are terrible. My husband and I - he's also blind - we listen to Spitting Image every week. We love it.' So they didn't need any of the visual impact...

PF: Roger and I always thought - always knew - that the puppets were not good performers. They couldn't tell jokes. It was then the script that got criticised, because, as you say, the puppets had a visual impact, and they weren't very criticised. But we always knew that the scripts were pretty good.

LG: But also, looking at... they're not very well operated, speaking as one of the operators, compared to stuff that happens now, that is terribly primitive, what they're actually doing, and very ungainly. You look at the caricature and go 'that's fantastic,' but the actual...

JD: But I think you're being unfair, because I remember laughing a lot at movements that the puppets would do, like... we saw Spock's ears...

SN: You also saw there, with Thatcher going to the toilet - I think Anthony did that sketch. Anthony was stunningly, brilliantly, creative with the puppets, and he could, with a slight movement of the arm, make it look as if Mrs Thatcher was waving her willy around. [laughter] ... and shaking it a bit, and kicking. Actually there were very few puppeteers who actually could creatively... create what's happening below the waist, as it were, and Anthony and Nigel Plaskitt, who's here tonight, who was also on the show for many, many years, and Nigel and Anthony were the sort of puppeteers who could creatively do... make you imagine what was really happening underneath, which was often kicking. To make a puppet, which you only see from the waist up, look as if it's kicking somebody below, is a tremendous skill. I did puppetry - I could never do it. I never learned how to do it.

JL: When people used to say 'was Spitting Image your idea?' I used to say 'no it wasn't,' but actually it's like somebody having this great idea: 'why don't we fly to the moon?' Yeah, that's great... how do we do that? And then it takes somebody to invent the aeroplane, the internal combustion engine, the rocket, and there's a thousand things... and all these little insights that each person on the team - the writer, the puppeteer, a mould maker - would bring, meant an advance. So, for example, in the first series, we spent a huge amount of time... a simple thing that an actor could do very easily, which is... President sitting at desk, aide walks in through door, up to desk and says 'good morning, Mr President.'

That takes five puppeteers, crouching lie this, holding half a ton of latex rubber and cables trailing, and the camera not having to see their legs. It used to take forever. And so, instead, we just thought... oh one day, you're just going to lose your temper... so I can't... no don't, please...' said the director... Peter... 'don't bring them in through the door, it's going to take another three and a half hours. Just have them pop up from behind the desk.' So that's where that comes from. You've got Reagan and suddenly... 'Good morning...' and so it's better, it's better puppeteering, it's much more fun, much more interesting.

LG: And easier.

JL: Yes, and so many of the things... we were trying to do things that human - that was Jim Henson's point - we were trying to do things that human beings do easily but which are hell for puppets to do and vice versa.

SN: That's right. And that is... what puppets do is pop-up fun. We used to have this phrase on Spitting Image 'pop-up fun'... we would always pop up because as you said it was much easier. The other thing that the puppets could do, that human beings could not do, and that was that they could remain absolutely still and silent when being hit. It's the ode to Buster Keaton thing. Buster Keaton was trained not to show pain and the puppets couldn't show pain. That's why it was actually so funny, watching Tebbit knock the hell out of somebody because they did all that but they actually never showed any pain.

JD: Could I just ask - we'll have another set of clips in a minute but just before then - about the writing itself because you have a lot of very talented writers that came through the Spitting Image factory, as it were. Grant and Naylor for one... Ian Hislop did, didn't he?

JL: Yeah. First the original four core team were Ian Hislop - obviously Private Eye and Have I Got News for You - and Nick Newman , his partner, famous cartoonist, and Grant and Naylor, who went on to do Red Dwarf, so we were blessed. Everyone was very young. They were just marvellous what those guys could do on a Saturday morning. We got good at it, doing the topical stuff. They'd come in...

JD: You would leave a portion every week, wouldn't you?

JL: Yeah, originally... the very first show, all we could do was to get in the name of the Derby winner the previous day. Somebody went... 'Thunderball' and for a sketch with Reagan or something that's all we could manage. And by the... at the end of the three years that I did my penal servitude... we were doing five or six minutes that we'd write on Saturday, shoot on Saturday, put in the show and it would be out on Sunday. It was amazing.

PF: It was an innovation really.

JD: Shall we... let's have another set of clips.

[clips]

JD: So we ended there on a song which... the songs were a regular feature. Were they there from the beginning?

JL: Yeah.

JD: Because I found myself singing the other day 'I've Never Met a Nice South African.' That sort of sticks in my mind. But you did quite a bit of spin-off merchandising, didn't you? It became...

PF: Well, we tried. We thought we'd make millions out of selling spin-offs, you know, but I think we only really had one successful product which was a series of squeaky things you have dogs playing with, and they worked very well. They were on the market for...

JL: The squeaky dog chews, yeah.

PF: But we'd do the most extraordinary things like royal slippers - you know, you'd put your foot into Prince Charles and the other foot into Di - and some people collect these things.

SN: They're collectors items. They are really. You can see them on Ebay sometimes.

PF: But what's quite interesting about the puppets in the first clip was all the ones apart from Sue were what we used to call cut-foam puppets which were... when there was a requirement in the script for somebody called a 'generic person', you know, we wouldn't model it specifically for the sketch, but we would take foams of existing caricatures like... someone would cut around Henry Kissinger's mouth and stick it onto Princess Anne, but upside-down...

SN: That was Claire Rayner, bits of Claire Rayner were round the mouth. It wasn't Claire Rayner, the puppet that we had, but there were bits of her, I think her mouth was on...

JD: Did you literally... you did the month's puppeteers as well... that they used caricatures...

JL: Yeah, Nigel Plaskitt was definitely one of those, wasn't he?

PF: Yes, but he never knew it.

JL: He didn't know. [laughter] It's one of the strangest things.

PF: It was complete coincidence.

JL: Was it?

PF: Oh yeah, sure.

JL: Nobody ever recognises their own puppet. We could do a puppet of any of you here and you would be the last person in the room to realise it was you. It's the most extraordinary thing and at the end of the first series, Jon Blair and I, the other producer... Roger and Peter managed to somehow, I don't know how they did it, create a puppet of each of us and stick us in the show without - I dunno, we must have been the loo or something, I don't know how they did it - they got these things in the show without us knowing. And we're sitting watching the review and I said 'My God, Jon, there's you.' He said 'no, there's you but where am I?' [laughter] Really, really strange. And to this day I don't recognise the puppet. I said 'Roger, I do not have a pointy head.' He said 'you do have a pointy head.' And this puppet ended up in Richard Curtis's garden. He had it turned into a mannequin piece. [laughter]

PF: We used your puppet for a sketch on - who was the unfortunate aristocrat who... didn't you get recognised at a party as...

JL: Jamie Blandford , yeah, the Marquess of Blandford , yes, this heroin addict, I went to look at a house near Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, a little cottage and the woman said 'excuse me, you look frightfully familiar. Do we know you from somewhere?' I said 'well, some people say I slightly resemble Jamie Blandford' and she said 'oh no, but he looks quite well.' [laughter]

JD: Louise, I believe that you've brought something along... now might be a good time, you've had lots of talk of puppets, perhaps we can...

LG: She's looking quite young, really, considering she hasn't been... I'll take out her eyes, because Steve Nallon is the head of eyes.

SN: I was never very good at puppeteering so I used to always operate the eye mechanism.

LG: And this should have a bulb on it.

PF: I'll send you one.

LG: Will you send me one?

PF: Yes.

SN: It worked like that.

LG: But you have to... he has to suck and blow.

SN: I have to suck and blow... won't be the first time... [laughter]

LG: 'Thank you. Welcome, how lovely to have you all here at the NFT.' [laughter] 'Go on then.'

JD: Have I got to ask you a question?

LG: Yes.

PF: Don't make me do that.

JD: It's like Basil Brush.

LG: Stupid boy.

JD: I can't believe that that's how you did the eyes with the sucking and blowing.

LG: No, we didn't, there was a little... a photographer's bottle.

SN: Sometimes, at the last minute there could be... some days there was a hole in it and that's what you had to do. They were operated by all sorts of a last-minute things...

LG: It was pretty primitive. And we would have big rubber gloves.

JD: And sometimes you would use real legs as well, wouldn't you?

LG: Yes.

JD: You'd do all sorts of inserts and...

LG: Well, then you'd insert... [laughter] [applause] ... but it was all fairly basic.

SN: This was... actually my favourite puppet ever because the mouth is so good, it's so expressive, do you see what I mean? You can make her very angry and also very... when she laughs she's very good.

LG: [laughs] '... Well, carry on.'

JD: It's a strangely sensual thing, there's something... maybe it's the latex, I don't know what it is really... Did you get more technically adventurous as you went on? Did you try and make the puppets do more and more things as the series progressed?

PF: Well, we couldn't really because when you read through the scripts for the following week's show, there'd usually be... in the scripts there'd be demands for more puppets. One week we actually made fourteen, I think, and so things had to stay the same. We just didn't have time. There wasn't time in the process for continual innovations. I mean, the standard got higher, the... when we started it was just Roger and myself who did the modelling and we very soon realised we couldn't handle the number of puppets that would have to be made. And so we trained up initially two people, and then two more so there were six of us modelling later on. So that was absolutely essential, but still not able to change things.

JD: But you did experiment with... I can remember some stop-motion things as well... stop-motion animation. So did you feel there was a need to kind of push the envelope, particularly after the show had been on for a few seasons?

PF: It was mainly, I think, because one of the caricaturists, Dave Stoten and also his friend Tim Watts had ambitions in the world of animation. So I think they persuaded us to have a go at it. And also they provided a difference, a difference in texture... it was probably far more expensive than puppets, I'm not sure, it took far longer.

JD: Just in terms of content, I remember that there were rumours that you did a Leon Brittan puppet as a turd, a giant talking turd, and then realised it was in bad taste or someone decided it was in bad taste.

JL: That's a very good idea, I wish we had thought of that.

JD: Is that not true then?

PF: We did have a turd, I think it sounds like one of Roger's idea to me...

JD: You did do Kenneth Baker as a slug though didn't you?

PF: We had a lot of complaints about that, mainly from slugs. [laughter]

SN: Actually, I did a programme with Roy Hattersley because we... a television thing talking about it, and he was very interesting. He said 'actually' he said 'Steve, when you are sat opposite in the dispatch box and you see Kenneth Baker smarmingly smug at you, whoever thought of the snail-slug idea, absolutely captured him perfectly.' [laughter] I think it was Bill Dare who did that. Was it Bill Dare, who I think is here tonight? I think Bill, I think it was Bill's idea to do him as a slug. I'm thinking, as well, he slowly developed as a slug, because he started eating lots of lettuce one week and then the next week he had little things coming out of his ears, and then he became a fully-formed slug.

JD: I loved that because it wasn't commented upon and there was just one week we turned round and he was actually on the wall.

SN: He was on the wall. Yes, absolutely right.

JD: It was those kind of... all that detail in the background...

PF: You know, Kenneth Baker himself is a great fan of caricatures and cartoons and he collects everything he can find... but he turned his back me at a cartoon function and he hated that caricature.

SN: Well, he knew how damaging it had been to him, because, as I said, Roy Hattersley said, 'you absolutely captured it brilliantly because that's exactly what he's like.' I mean, one of the other voices I did on Spitting image was Robert Runcie, the Archbishop of Canterbury. And the Robert Runcie voice... it was the same problem as the Pope and that was he spoke very slowly, do you remember? And we all had to audition. And I did the Robert Runcie voice and the Robert Runcie 'spoke... very... slowly... very... precisely' and you said 'we can't do that, can we?' And we had to change...

I can't remember exactly what happened but I think it was your idea to do him as a seven-year-old boy. To take that voice 'that... slow... deliberate... voice, slightly speed it up and make it sound as if he's seven years of age.' And we had this wonderful sketch about him believing in Santa Claus, didn't we? And he was arguing with the Bishop of Durham about whether there was a Santa Claus. And he said 'oh, well, there has to be a Santa Claus. If there wasn't a Santa Claus, who'd feed the reindeer?' Do you remember that one?

JL: I do. That other great sketch... Runcie playing... praying in the Church and there's this terrible clanking sound of bottles and things like that, and Terry Waite comes in... he says 'I got the duty free out... so a bottle of gin and 200 Silk Cut for the Missus, is it?'

SN: The reason I mentioned Robert Runcie there was because I did a programme about the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and I spoke to various people from the Church of England. And what they were saying to me was nobody does the impression of Robert Runcie when they speak about him, they do your impersonation of him on Spitting Image. Then I began to realise actually how subversive the programme could be at that level. And they said to me... he said 'you've done a lot of harm.' When I met John Gummer who was a big Anglican and I said 'I also do Robert Runcie, he froze me out. He absolutely would not speak to me from then on.

JD: We'll return to the subject of power because it's very interesting but let's have another set of clips.

[clips]

SN: You see you watch, you see a clip like that and you think 'where are... where is the equivalent now?' Because it's just crying out to be done.

JD: It was really funny, I'd forgotten.

JL: Yes.

PF: What's important is that... I mean the caricatures worked and I think they were always recognisable and they were very strong. They weren't bad. But put those together with a caricatured voice and what you've got is something really quite powerful. Because I think that voice caricature is actually stronger than just pushing someone's face around.

JD: You had an amazing roster of people who've now gone on to have incredible careers... voice artists...

SN: I think I would put a word in for Harry Enfield because to me he was the best voice-over artist on the show. He wasn't the best impressionist, to be honest, but he was the person who could always caricature a voice. His Douglas Hurd was inspired.

JL: Yeah.

SN: And it didn't really sound like him. But when you heard it, it was that truth about it. It was... I mean I'll do it a bit but 'you'll remember Douglas Hurd used to '... sound like Zippy from Rainbow and he did have that rather gruff sound.' And Harry - because Harry was such a physical guy as well - and he used to put all... at the voice records, he used to put all his energy - you see, if you're doing voices sometimes... many voice-over artists sit in front of the - in the middle of Soho or something - you sit in front of the microphone and just do the voice - Harry never worked like that. Harry always put every ounce of himself in it and I think he was, for me, he was the best voice-over artist on the show.

JD: And Steve Coogan?

SN: Steve Coogan? Steve Coogan came in relatively late. Chris Barrie , Chris Barrie did all these wonderful voices...

JD: He did Reagan didn't he?

SN: He did Reagan, he also... he did all the popular voices in the sense of people like David Coleman and Barry Norman, which were slowly added to that first series, to sort of leaven the politics as well. And his Reagan was incredibly inventive. And Steve Coogan as well... but oddly enough, I'm not going to mention names but there were a couple of impressionists who came into the series sometimes that just did very, very accurate voices, and for my money they couldn't always quite make it work. Because you had to be... you had to make it... the voice sound like it looked, not just doing the...

JL: Yeah, it's interesting that... you look at that clip with Kinnock and Hattersley. It's so, so simple, it's one joke. But the verve with which it's done... and that comes from... the voice is all recorded, that's not live, it's one person giving it everything - in that case Chris Barrie and obviously Steve doing Hattersley... or is that you Louise? Was it you?

LG: No.

JL: And somebody's really going at that stuff and they're giving it this fantastic flavour. And it just becomes funnier and funnier the more you watch it. It's not much writing going on. And as the thing wore on, it became - to give the puppeteers more space to do a different kind of comedy and the voice people - it got really more interesting than what, at the beginning, would be very tightly written scripts, lots of formal jokes and then people formally doing the puppeteering and formally doing the voices. No, it's interesting.

JD: Just to bring you back to the power thing that we were talking about, I mean, you were aware of... it was an incredibly powerful force because you talked about it doing damage to various people, I'm sure it damaged the two Davids, well particularly with the little puppets... that diminishing...

JL: It's funny, well, this is often raised but you never hear David Owen, who's career didn't seem to do any better complaining about it. It's a personality thing. And David Owen's not the sort of fellow who's going to complain about that, actually. 'Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, I'm half an inch taller than Neil Kinnock you know.'

PF: But the little puppet thing was interesting, they just... we had those, but they were made initially because we thought they would be cheaper than the big ones and that we wouldn't be able to carry on producing the large-scale puppets within the budget. So we thought, let's shrink them and we'll use the big ones with other big ones, we'll use the little ones altogether in their own sketches, which, of course, became impossible because they might as well... put them together, we couldn't respect this size thing. And so the Owen/Steel think happened because they were already two different sizes.

JD: So it wasn't intentionally satirical...

PF: No, they just had to appear together. Then, it worked.

JL: But having said that, when we did the first 90 puppets or so, we had to make a judgement as to who we thought would be important over the course of the year and we guessed that David Owen was going places and David Steel wasn't. So we made a little David Steel, thinking that he probably wouldn't be in the news very much. And then when the writers wrote the two Davids sketch, we were stuck. But it's so natural. It couldn't be the other way round, could it? It wouldn't be believable.

PF: It wouldn't have worked. It was actually the relationship which the public could see.

JD: It sort of worked that... like... I can't remember which sketch was the first one to put the big one and the little one together but I think there was a worry on the floor that it would look stupid and in fact it looked the opposite. It just worked, didn't it.

PF: You didn't question it. You just thought...

JD: No, you just accepted it.

PF: The irony about the size thing was that they cost twice as much as the big ones to make.

LG: Did they? Why?

PF: Well, the clothes had to be specially tailored.

LG: Oh, of course.

JD: But politically, did... it would appear to be a left-wing show because it was constantly attacking the government but did you get into trouble for that?

PF: I think right-wing caricature is a rare thing. Did we get into trouble?

JL: No, I mean the thing is that you get the usual whinging from people but of course any topical comedy is going to go against the prevailing government of the day. They often say satire is often... flourishes under a Conservative government but that's not the case. It should be a wonderful time for satire now because what you want is a strong government, a government with a very large majority so that people feel essentially safe and they can take a lot of kicking. And obviously right in the middle of that very long Tory government it was kind of perfect. But they should have... as many have said, there should be... wouldn't it be brilliant... Spitting Image now? You could just have so much fun with what's going on.

SN: But if I remember correctly we came... Spitting Image began in the beginning of Thatcher's second term. She had established her reputation. Reagan was also there, so Spitting Image arrived at a good time as well, because you did have two weirdo world leaders, as it were, in charge. And now would be perfect time to, as it were...

JL: Yes, it was so different to those Labour Party sketches because they never said anything. Kinnock and Hattersley did exactly that. We couldn't think of more sketches, we had to artificially put lots of anti-Labour Party sketches in, just so that it would appear to be a bit balanced.

JD: Shall we... let's have the next package of clips because I'm keen to see it.

[clips]

JD: I just want to ask a couple more questions and then let's open it up to the floor... if anyone's got anything else out there. But just kind of... on what happened as the show... after the show wound down, because there's been talk, at various times, of revivals... is that something that was ever going to happen or could still happen... a new series? [laughter]

SN: Who knows?

JL: Roger Law says not. So you can blame him. No, no, we have thought about it. It's a nightmarish thing to start all over again. We were all relatively younger and more foolish and had nothing to lose, really, in those days. It takes so much money. We reckon about between three and four million, just to start. And it's... getting everybody together is probably beyond the wit of everybody. I know there's considerable enthusiasm, would you like to do it again, Steve?

SN: I... er... yes. I would actually, I would... I couldn't do the puppets nowadays, I'd happily do the voices. 'I'd like to do Ann Widdecombe. I think we could get Ann Widdecombe back into Spitting Image. I think it would be a rather heavy puppet but I think she'd be rather fun to do. But it is... it would work, but it would be like building the factory, wouldn't it, you would have to almost build a factory.

JL: You would have to...

PF: It would be very difficult to put as good a team back together again... from the workshop to the performance.

JL: I've... you know, there's quite a lot of the sketches tonight that were after my time, where... when I left in '87... to this day when I smell liquid latex I feel ill with the fright that that programme engendered. So it was years and years before I could even hear the name Spitting Image without feeling slightly unwell. But I'm amazed... some of it's quite good, isn't it, really? [laughter] It's incredible... you just assume...

LG: Well, it's also interesting how it developed and how the working of the puppets is much more sophisticated towards the end and the shooting and the whole thing...

JL: Yes, absolutely, after I'd left it worked out brilliantly.

PF: The thing that opened up for us was the writing, wasn't it?

JD: But Steve Bendelack, who directed The League of Gentlemen, worked on... he was there from the very early days...

PF: He was the first person that Roger and I employed. We... it was when we worked in Cambridge we were beginning to find a way of making these things and we employed Steve to sweep the floor and make coffee. And usually he'd make the coffee, spill it, then sweep the floor. Then, of course, he did direct some of the last shows.

JD: And he talked about how much... he often talked to me about how much he learned from doing those shows and how ambitious they would try and be... and how techniques were perfected. It definitely got more ambitious as it went on, you could see that, as you were saying.

PF: I think early on - I think John would agree - we were very nervous of leaving one puppet or two puppets in front of the camera for too long because we thought 'they won't sustain, they won't... they'll just get boring.' So things had to move very, very, fast and very, very busy. Chickens used to appear in the corner of the screen and something going on up... just so the screen was lively. But then as people really learnt, over a period of years... and I remember one of the last ones of Thatcher where she's alone in the House of Commons, just crying and it was fantastically powerful. It was very good but we didn't dare do that in the early days.

SN: In the puppeteering, I was often doing the white cat or something like that. I was often given those sort of characters. But sometimes, actually, with certain sketches you could steal the sketch by... there was one... Ken Branagh and Emma Thompson sketch and I literally stole the sketch because I was the white cat who stole their Oscar. And you often have these little sub-plots going on and little gags going on in the background and I'm sure The Muppets did the same. And it was partly to keep us interested and occupied, but you could actually watch the programme again and actually see all these little things that were happening in the corner and little in-jokes and stuff.

JD: I believe we've got a very quick short clip and then lets go into some questions.

[clip]

JD: So, fire away, if anyone's got any questions. There's a hand up at the back there.

Audience member: Did you find yourselves talking amongst yourselves using funny voices...?

SN: The voice-over days were so fraught sometimes, weren't they? It was a very odd experience. Yeah, we did have lots of fun and adding bits and all the rest of it but the... we practised... often what would happen with voices, we would try to get the voice for the next week's show or whatever and we were like musicians sometimes - musicians when they find certain voices tricky actually ask each other how they do it and they pass on the information - and that often happened. It happened recently with Ann Widdecombe because I had to do Ann Widdecombe for a show and I actually got in touch with Kate Robbins who is one of the voice artists and I said 'I've got to do Ann Widdecombe' and I said 'how do you do it?' and she told me. She said 'well, you mix a high and a low note together 'and you get that high and you get that low.' And that's how she taught me to do it. So the voice-over artists are always very encouraging to each other. But the voice-over times were actually quite a fraught date sometimes.

JL: Yeah, I remember we used to say 'can anybody do Kenneth Baker?' and people would sort of try it out. And so auditions on the spot really, there was never time to do anything simple like ring up the voice-over people the day before and say 'we're planning a Kenneth Baker sketch' or anything like that.

SN: It could be difficult. I mean, I remember some of those auditions round the mic and you'd have... in the same room you would have Steve Coogan, Harry Enfield, Chris Barrie, Rory Bremner, myself, all - and John Sessions - all auditioning. It was a very strange process. We couldn't do it privately. We all had to get up and either make a fool of ourselves or do it well... or whatever happened.

JD: Lots of questions... yes, the lady with the glasses.

Audience member: [partially inaudible] To what extent did the original puppeteering team actually have any experience of ... TV puppets and, perhaps that said ... presented on this series ... or other shows?

PF: Well, Louise, you were one of the first puppeteers from The Muppet Show.

LG: Yes, well I'd worked on The Muppets , which was much simpler and easy. And I always had a problem with these puppets. They were quite heavy and Anthony, when he took over a lot of the puppets I did... the energy required and the strength, the physical strength was huge. Towards the end, some of the puppets just got ridiculously large, the Schwarzenegger and Stallone and they were actually supported by sticks to take some of the weight because they were just obscene. And Anthony Asbury had worked...

SN: Well, Anthony had done Little Shop of Horrors and therefore he'd... huge, physically very strong guy.

LG: And then we had Richard Robinson who was part of the Wood Green Ginger

SN: No that was Terry [Lee] Wright

SN: I was a puppeteer, I was very lucky because I... actually if you look at my arms, I've actually got very long arms above my head and there was one puppeteer, Richard Robinson - do you remember Richard? - and poor Richard had these tiny little hands like this...

LG: So his head was always in shot!

SN: ...his head was always in shot. Your catch phrase on the first series was 'Richard, we're seeing your head.' He couldn't help it.

PF: The main reason why the puppets were so large - even to begin with - was because of the clothes, because the costumes which usually came from Marks and Spencer's or Oxfam.

LG: Charity shops.

PF: So... they also had to hide the puppeteer who was working behind and underneath them. So they just were big.

LG: Yeah, but they got bigger.

JD: Yes, the gentleman there at the top.

Audience member: I just wondered how many - roughly - could you estimate, you actually discarded or destroyed over the years when they were not current or whatever or you needed resources or space.

PF: They were always stored because... you may have noticed in some of the clips, some of the part actors, some of the minor parts are in fact... I spotted a couple there, one was... were just puppets in... put a different wig on and you've got an ordinary person or a doorman or a policeman. They were always valuable for that, so we never destroyed them.

JD: Didn't you...

PF: In fact the moulds are still preserved.

SN: Didn't you make a Lady Di that you weren't satisfied with, then paint her black...

PF: Yes.

SN: So she became a black singer, didn't she?

PF: I think she was called Hyacinth .

SN: Hyacinth , that's right. The black Lady Di, wasn't she?

PF: We did... we also did, I think we did probably about six or seven different versions of Thatcher because she was... you could get her profile right but the full face would suffer. You get the full face right and the profile wouldn't be right. And of course the puppet would have to move around. So we were constantly trying to get a better caricature of her.

SN: Did people ever buy their own caricatures or...?

PF: Well, there was a huge... it was actually Sotheby's first online auction of a selected number of puppets, which sold very, very well. We don't know, for sure, who bought each one but we have heard that people did buy...

LG: Well, my friends bought the Queen and gave it to me.

PF: Your friends?

LG: My friends. They bought me the Queen.

SN: I've got Alan Bennett at home. I've got Alan Bennett. I didn't buy... you gave it to me actually.

PF: That's right. One person bought the entire cabinet. The entire Tory cabinet. [laughter]

LG: Do you know who it was?

PF: Yeah, but... it's a bit odd, isn't it!

JD: Yes.

Audience member: [inaudible] Did you ever do Beth Simpson?

PF: Er, no, the show finished before it comes on. I hesitated because it was made for a Russian programme, because later on other... TV companies from other countries said that... could they do Spitting Image - a version of Spitting Image? And we said, well, we can make puppets for you, we can do the caricatures, we can make the puppets, we can show you the technology we've learned from making them work but you've got to write your own scripts. And I think the Russian programme went out for about a quarter of an hour until it was stopped. [laughter] There's still a version going in Portugal. The French have always had a slightly different version of their own.

SN: Isn't there an Israeli one as well?

PF: Hey?

JD: An Israeli one?

PF: I don't know, is there?

SN: There's a German one.

PF: There's a German one, a Greek one, an Italian one.

JL: I started telling somebody this story earlier on... I went out with Anthony, the aforementioned puppeteer, to train the Italian team in Rome for three weeks. It was called Teste di gomma in Italian - 'Rubber Heads' - and the very nice young Italian producer called Roberto and we had all this discussion about which puppets he wanted and what he did was - he couldn't have the Pope because that would be considered far too rude in Italy and there were various other people he couldn't have - but he definitely wanted the entire Italian cabinet, however many, was it 20-odd puppets, which Peter and Roger laboriously built and shipped out to Rome and the programme was on. Three weeks later the entire government resigned. [laughter] They were never heard of again. They had to start again. You could have guessed, couldn't you, really?

JD: Time for one more question. Yes, the gentleman there.

Audience member: Apart from Ann Widdecombe, which other current politicians would make good characters?

SN: I think Prescott would be good, wouldn't he?

JL: Yes.

PF: Blair certainly.

SN: Blair.

JD: Would you do Blair as a little... did they do Blair as a little one?

PF: Yes, he was a little one. But he was little because he was so young and he was so eager to be in the... this was when he was floating behind the scenes in the party...

SN: He was done... if I remember correctly, he was done as a sixth former wasn't he?

PF: Yes, it was 'me, me, me, me next, me next...' Then he did it. But his face is changing so rapidly now. It would be quite interesting to do it. I think he's beginning to look very like the Steve Bell caricature.

SN: The interesting thing though... I was reading today that Roy Bremner was - obviously started work on David Cameron - and from an impressionist point of view, the older somebody is, the more interesting their voice becomes and actually if you listen to David - I'm sure somebody will crack the code with David Cameron and say 'oh, well that's how...' because that's how impressionists work... somebody somewhere cracks the code and once the code is cracked then it's very easy to spot how it can be done.

JL: How does that happen Steve? I'm fascinated by that...

SN: It is... if I'm correct, there are a couple of voices... Hattersley was done by nobody before I did it and so on. And the other one...

JL: Because you didn't know... you didn't realise Hattersley sounded odd until you did it.

SN: Well, that's... I think what impressionists somehow do... I don't know how we do it in that sense but we capture, not necessarily always an accurate impersonation but the perception that you have in your mind of how that person sounds.

JD: Well, isn't it the same that a cartoonist will do...

PF: Well, the same thing happens with visual, with drawn caricatures. When a new politician comes along you can see the... we used to struggle to get a likeness at the very beginning of someone's career, and then you'd always look at other people's work, of course. And slowly a recognised iconography would develop. You can see it. With Blair now, and Steve Bell's done that thing with the eye, that other cartoonists are beginning to use it, simply because it is how he's perceived now.

SN: And you see that, because all the impressionists all know each other and, to be honest, we accept that that's the way it works, because, as Peter says, I remember when Jeremy Paxman was first done on Spitting Image, it was Steve Coogan who did it, and he always used to do a 'yyyyyyyy...eeeeee...sssssss...' at the beginning of every sketch. And then Rory Bremner picked up on it. I don't think Rory Bremner... it wasn't so much stealing, it was that thing of acknowledging that that is the way to present the character. 'One of my favourites was Alan Bennett, he was always one of my little favourites... doing that sort of... that top lip... so tight and then it sort of... springs and so on.' But I used to do the voices simply because people used to challenge me to do them. That's often how I used to work.

JD: Do you do it for fun? Do you do it at home?

SN: I do some voices for fun, but that aren't wanted... [laughter] It's true. Some of my favourite voices are the ones that nobody wants.

JD: Can you give us one before we finish?

SN: I'll give you Joan Hickson as Miss Marple. Nobody has ever requested Joan Hickson as Miss Marple but it's my favourite voice. 'Oh, Chief Inspector...' [laughter] '... I can see and tell you it was in the sherry, you see. You should have noticed it but I'm afraid you didn't... and nobody's ever requested me to do it before... so thank you so much.' [laughter and applause]

JD: On that fantastic note... we're going to finish with another set of clips, but we're going to leave the stage before then, so please join me in thanking Louise - the Queen, Peter, Steve and John.

[applause]