Of all the books I’ve used for research on Dirty Feed over the years, I’ve rarely quoted from one as extensively as I have from Tooth & Claw: The Inside Story of Spitting Image (Faber, 1986). It is, for me, the absolute gold standard of any behind-the-scenes book. Not just because it’s fascinating – although it clearly is – but because it’s goddamn accurate.
This is a constant bugbear of mine. While researching the Doctor at Large episode “No Ill Feeling!” for this article in 2019, it was notable that certain books managed to get both the TX date and title of the episode incorrect. Which is kinda the basics, really. Tooth & Claw, meanwhile, manages to correctly cite which exact episode certain sketches appeared in, which gives you confidence in the rest of the book. And making sure such things were correct was a lot harder in 1986 than it is now.
Anyway, surely everybody loved the book at the time of its release too? Sadly not. Thanks to Sham Mountebank, who pointed me towards the following contemporary review of the book, from short-lived LM magazine.1
Lewis Chester
Tooth & Claw – The Inside Story of Spitting Image
Faber and Faber / 200pp / £3.95 paperbackWhile I was reading this book the BBC were repeating some vintage material in their ’50 years of television’ celebrations. One show in particular interested me: That Was The Week That Was, the weekly revue from the early 60s which made the names of David Frost and Willie Rushton and on which, on one legendary occasion, a member of the audience walked up to Bernard Levin in mid-monologue and delivered a resounding right-hander which knocked Levin off his stool.
TW3, as it came to be known, was a bit rough around the edges, but it was fresh, it was original, it took risks, and it was live.
Will we be seeing repeats of Spitting Image in 20 years time? I doubt it – the show’s topical satire simply isn’t up to it. And that’s why this book, the story of the show’s inception and of its internal politics, personality clashes and crises, is not the most gripping of tales; Spitting Image is a programme which seldom fulfils the high promise it holds for millions, and only succeeds because there’s no competition in TV satire.
If Tooth & Claw were fiction, I’d accuse author Lewis Chester of poor characterisation; the only people whose personalities come across from its pages are the master puppeteers Fluck and Law themselves, who, I’m relieved to learn, still wonder what the hell they’ve got themselves into. And so the fine detail of budgets, resignations and board-meetings is of no interest to a reader who knows little and cares less about the characters of this real-life drama.
Like some of the show’s more obscure in-jokes, this book will appeal to ‘media’ people but leave the rest of us baffled, wondering whether it really merits all this attention.
There are some funny stories, as well as a tantalising glimpse into the contents of the pilot show for Spitting Image, which for contractual reasons will never be broadcast. Among the sketches was a mass self-disembowelment session by a group of Japanese businessmen, involving knives, offal, sausages, cocktail sticks and glacé cherries.
It’s also interesting to know that the producers once seriously considered calling the show The Enough Money For A New Mental Hospital Show, and that lampoons of the Royal Family were cut from the first show because of an impending Royal visit to Central Television’s headquarters. The Royals feature heavily: an entire chapter is dedicated to the episode with the Queen Mother, whose impending appearance as a Spitting Image character prompted the horrified Daily Express to describe Her Royal Highness as ‘untouchable’ by man and puppet alike.
In the most interesting chapter of his book. Lewis Chester asks some of the show’s victims how they like their puppets. Liverpool leftie Derek Hatton says that his appearance on Spitting Image was ‘a recognition of what we have achieved in this city’, Terry Wogan’s wishes he ‘didn’t sound so much like Eamonn Andrews’; David Steel wonders why his puppet is ‘so small, when I am in fact noticeably taller than Neil Kinnock’.
If the book comes to any conclusion, it’s that satire is an essential part of any healthy society. It’s a sign of the times, though, that a moderately funny show like Spitting Image should attract so much flak when you consider what they got away with on TW3 20 years ago. It’s also a sign of the times that Spitting Image is regarded as important enough to have books written about it.
65% DAVID CHEAL
Oh dear.
David Cheal is, of course, entitled to his view on the quality of Spitting Image. But it is very, very funny that he complains the show isn’t important enough to write a book about, when the series continued for a full decade after this review was written. And then people spent over two decades suggesting it should come back. And then it did come back. And when it was cancelled, the show refused to take it lying down, and it became a theatre proposition instead.
Oh, and the show literally did get repeats 20 years later, on Granada Plus. And people are still watching the DVDs today.
I’m not expecting Cheal to have a crystal ball. But if you’re going to pointlessly try to predict the future, when somebody asked you to merely to review a book, you risk this kind of nonsense. Guessing how important Spitting Image would turn out to be was a fool’s errand. Things are written all the time, and people can decide how “important” the subject will end up being later on. You can’t leap to the end early, or you risk getting it entirely wrong, and not documenting what turns out to be immensely worthwhile material.
That, I feel, would have been obvious even in 1986. If you weren’t busy sulking about TW3, for some reason.
Not Living Marxism; this was a project from the publisher of Crash & Zzap!64, which folded after four issues. ↩