One of the most frustrating things about writing my series on flash-frames in The Young Ones and Spitting Image has been how absurdly difficult the research has been. There really is a ludicrous amount of misinformation out there. I already wrote a little about this at the start of the year, but I have more examples. Oh, so many more examples.
Take Peter Seddon’s Law’s Strangest Cases (Portico, 2016), which is one of the very few books to discuss the Norris McWhirter Spitting Image flash. To the point where it has been used as a main source in reporting elsewhere online. Quite understandably – this is a proper, published book, it really shouldn’t be getting major things wrong.
Sadly, we immediately run into problems:
“It all started with the television broadcast of a 1984 episode of Spitting Image, the series whose lampoonery through the medium of cruelly parodic puppetry has caused many a celebrity to fume.
The good news for Norris was that he wasn’t on it. Or was he? For thereby hangs the tale.”
I mean, he certainly wasn’t in a 1984 episode of Spitting Image. That was the famed “scriptwriters are incredibly good in bed” flash, not the Norris McWhirter head-on-topless-body flash, which happened in 1985.
But let’s not get grumpy about an incorrect date. That’s arsehole territory. The bulk of the reporting must surely be correct.
“The Times subsequently reported that Mr McWhirter, aged 59, had taken out an action for libel against the Independent Broadcasting Authority at Horseferry Road Magistrates’ Court. McWhirter was adamant that he had seen ‘a grotesque and ridiculing image of my face superimposed on the top of a body of a naked woman’. It really doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Norris McWhirter didn’t take any action for libel whatsoever. His case was solely concerned with subliminal messaging; libel was never part of his accusations.
Now true, the book does then go on to say the following:
“He asserted that the broadcasting of the image was a criminal offence under the Broadcasting Act 1981, but not because of ‘what’ it was – it was how long it lasted that was the real bone of contention.
‘And how long did it last?’ asked the judge with due concern. Norris McWhirter’s reply was brief but not nearly as brief as the offending image: ‘A quarter of a second,’ was his stunning reply.
McWhirter’s contention was that the image had been broadcast subliminally, using the sort of technique that unscrupulous advertisers or political regimes are said to employ to implant subconscious images and messages into the addled brains of the world’s couch potatoes.”
So the book does understand at least part of the case. But if you’re going to entirely misreport it as a libel action, you’ve pretty much fallen at the first hurdle.
But let’s not just pick on poor Peter Seddon. There have been endless issues when researching these articles. Let’s take a look at just one more. In fact, let’s go right back to 1985 itself, where you’d think there might be fewer problems.
The Daily Telegraph, 3rd July 1985, “IBA faces legal tangle over quick flashes”:
At the “Spitting Image” office in London’s Limehouse, Anne Newcombe, company manager confessed herself “mystified” by the new complaint. “We’re in a state of total confusion,” she said.
“It’s quite true that in the first series we did use this subliminal frame. Then, with the prior agreement of the IBA, we put out another quick flash, saying ‘If you have spotted this, you’re breaking the law’.
“Because the only way anyone could have picked it up would have been by recording it, and in strict law, that’s illegal.”
Over at the IBA even greater confusion reigned. They had heard nothing of Mr McWhirter’s summons. Futhermore, “Spitting Image” had never been given permission to put out a second joke caption.”
Confusion most certainly did reign. I am 99% certain that Spitting Image never broadcast a flash saying “If you have spotted this, you’re breaking the law”. I highly suspect this is just a garbled account of two jokes which appeared in Episode 2.4, broadcast on the 27th January 1985, and both of which do contain references about it being illegal to record the programme.
Firstly, there’s this message at the beginning of the episode, which is most definitely not a flash frame:
And later on, this genuine flash frame, which simply says the word “no”:
No wonder the IBA denied that they had ever given permission for the “second joke caption”, as mentioned by The Telegraph; the content of it wasn’t described correctly when the paper asked them about it!
It seems that this confusion can be blamed on Spitting Image itself giving misleading statements to the press. But the problem is, this flash keeps being misreported, years down the line. For instance, in the Daily Post on the 27th September 1988, we get:
“…Spitting Image used subliminal messages several times. They can only be detected by freeze-framing a video recording of the programme.
The first read: “Spitting Image scriptwriters are incredibly good in bed. Go out and sleep with one now.” The second, referring to the fact that recording television programmes is illegal, said: “If you have spotted this you are breaking the law.”
This piece, by Julie Cockcroft, was widely-syndicated in various papers around this time. Given the slight misquote of the first flash frame as well – it never actually said “Spitting Image scriptwriters” – then the whole thing begins to take on the air of the widely-used misquote “Don’t tell them your name, Pike”. Something incorrect, but which adds at least the illusion of context in a very small number of words, seems to beat actual facts.
I could go on, but you get my point. The difficulty in writing these pieces isn’t just that the subject is a difficult one per se. It’s that I’m trying to disentangle decades of wrong assumptions and unchecked factual errors. I very much doubt I’ve managed to get every single thing right. But I hope at least I’m closer to the truth than anybody has managed to get before, and that surely counts for something.