by Andy McSmith
The show even received a token of approval from Mary Whitehouse, a former teacher and Christian revivalist from the West Midlands, who had been campaigning since 1963 against what she saw as the spread of corruption and filth in television. Though now more than seventy years old, Mrs Whitehouse had lost none of the fire that made her a household name. In 1982, she launched a private prosecution of the National Theatre over a scene in Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain in which an actor simulated anal rape. She also campaigned against video nasties and some of Channel 4’s more esoteric programmes, and seemed to hope that she could get mainstream television back to where it was in the 1950s. As a way of demonstrating that crusading Christians also enjoyed a good joke, in January 1984 the National Viewers and Listeners Association, which she ran almost single-handedly, gave Yes Minister an award for making the nation laugh without resorting to blasphemy or smut. Margaret Thatcher came to the presentation ceremony, and performed in a specially written sketch, as herself, telling a startled Hacker and a horrified Sir Humphrey that she had decided to abolish economists. Eddington commented ruefully: ‘This occasion represents something of a low point. We had lots of conferences when the show was being produced, and we thought it was designed to annoy everybody. We must have failed.’3
The creators of Not the Nine O’Clock News were never in danger of receiving an award from Mrs Whitehouse. They did not attempt to compete with Yes Minister; their benchmark was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The show was not a situation comedy but a series of short sketches, aimed at the same audience as Python. The pilot even featured John Cleese. However, to avoid too close comparison, they eschewed surreal silliness and concentrated on mimicry and observation. The first series of six shows, featuring Atkinson, Chris Langham, Mel Smith and Pamela Stephenson – all of them unknown to TV audiences – bombed. The producers blamed Langham, who was allegedly not a team player, and sacked him via the cruel device of not telling him that a second series was being prepared. Griff Rhys Jones was brought in to complete the quartet, and the second series took off. The critics loved the tightness of the writing, the quality of the performances, and the way that the show made fun of anybody and anything. In one sketch, a post-punk youth dressed in leather, with zips and safety pins everywhere, is seen in a urinal, unable to remember which zip he needs to undo. They also parodied the new craze for expensive videos that promoted each new record release in a song called ‘Nice Video, Shame About the Song’, which as one critic put it, ‘had the quality of all true satire: it showed that those poking fun were as good and better at producing the parodied material than those being ridiculed’.4 There was a nicely observed studio discussion about why fat people should be proud of their weight, and call themselves ‘stout’, though an obese vicar was not prepared to go so far as to run down the street naked crying ‘Look at me, I’m enormous’. The clergy were a favourite target; in one sketch on whether or not the Church of England should reach out to devil worshippers, a trendy London vicar advocates ‘a bit less of the “Get thee behind me, Satan!”, and a bit more of the “Come on in, old mate, have a cup of tea”.’5
Though the show did not directly ridicule Thatcher or her ministers, with whom the BBC had to negotiate the annual licence fee, it did hit more distant or indirect political targets, including Ronald Reagan and the Youth Training Scheme. The Ayatollah song, which poked fun at Iran’s supreme leader, now looks more daring than it did then. The show also caused waves of offence among older viewers when, after the death of Sir Oswald Mosley, the former fascist leader, the cast dressed up as skinhead Nazis to sing a mock tribute, interspersed by the genuine tributes culled from upmarket newspapers. But the most extraordinary aspect of the show was the way it went for the police. The Brixton riots had given the Special Patrol Group (SPG) in particular an unenviable reputation, though Not …’s best known creation, Constable Savage, was a uniformed beat copper. He is called in for a dressing down over the 117 occasions on which he has arrested a Mr Winston Cudoogo on such charges as ‘possession of curly black hair and thick lips’. ‘You’re a bigot. Your whole time on duty is dominated by racial hatred and personal vendetta. There is no room for men like you in my force, Savage,’ says his furious superior. ‘I’m transferring you to the SPG.’
John Lloyd fell out with the BBC when the books he put together as spinoff s from Not the Nine O’Clock News became bestsellers, and he decided to go freelance. In May 1982, Tony Hendra, from whom he had borrowed the idea of a title beginning with ‘Not’, joined him in a pub off the Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, to introduce him to two artists named Peter Fluck and Roger Law, who had been well-known in the early 1970s as the makers of hideous puppet caricatures of politicians, which would be photographed for publication in the Sunday Times colour magazine. They lost their market when the Sunday supplements moved into lifestyle journalism, but had set up a workshop in London, with money from Clive Sinclair, inventor of the home computer. Hendra had brought them along to push the idea of a satirical puppet show for television. The upshot was Spitting Image, a unique melding of puppetry and satire. It was perhaps just as well that the quartet in the pub in west London could not see the mountain of problems before them. Whereas putting together a show like Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a comparatively straightforward business of getting the gags written, the performers rehearsed, and then telling the technicians to do their stuff, a small army of puppeteers, costumiers, voice impressionists, mould-makers, electricians, cameramen, foam experts, set-builders, model-makers and funny writers was needed to get the puppets saying their lines in front of a camera. Lewis Chester, Spitting Image’s first historian, observed:
Most innovatory comedy shows began with a core of like-minded enthusiasts. Spitting Image, however, was essentially based on the recruitment of skills to put something very complicated together. Since the skills were highly refined, the people involved tended to be individualistic and highly protective of their own value. In consequence, the kind of mutual support exhibited in the origins of their comic predecessors was conspicuous by its absence.6
The show gave a great deal more pleasure to those who watched it than to those who produced it.
When they began, the technology did not exist for creating puppets with moveable eyes and mouths. The nearest equivalent to Spitting Image was The Muppets, but creating animal puppets was technologically far less challenging than creating humans. Fluck and Law wasted a lot of time trying to learn from Hollywood’s special effects, before they realized that a puppet created for film was built to last only as long as it took to shoot the relevant scenes; whereas they needed puppets hardy enough for a series of programmes. This created immense financial problems, because it was impossible to draw up an accurate budget for creating the puppets until they knew how the programme was going to be done. Sinclair’s financial advisers were quick to panic and withdrew support.
Compared with all this, the job of selling the idea to a television company was almost straightforward. Thames Television turned it down; John Birt, at LWT, thought it would cost too much; Jeremy Isaacs, at Channel Four, liked the idea but did not come forward with the money. However, in September 1982 Central Television was persuaded to put up £60,000 for a short pilot. This was nowhere near enough money. The team had been working on Nancy the Parrot, who talked like Nancy Reagan and sat on Ronald Reagan’s shoulder. She alone cost £6,000 to construct, but her metal head turned out to be prohibitively heavy and she was never used. But having persuaded a Yorkshire businessman to put up yet more money, the team produced a pilot that Central liked so much that they announced they wanted twenty-six continuous weekly shows. Foreseeing the crippling demands of such a commitment, John Lloyd had to beg for less. They settled for thirteen shows.
Fluck and Law made their puppets in a studio in London, which was also where most of the other technicians and creative people were based and where it would have been easiest to record the show. However, union rules would not permit that, so each
week the puppets had to be carefully packed in a van and driven to Birmingham. On arrival, the problems of operating in a cramped studio were compounded by rivalries between the different agencies, by a never-ending dispute between John Lloyd and Tony Hendra about the sort of show they wanted to create, and by the occasional clash with Central Television’s management. An early battle over censorship almost led to resignations that could have sunk the show. Fluck and Law were very proud of their puppet queen, and wanted the first show, transmitted in February 1984, to include a sketch in which she was in her kitchen, frying sausages, when Margaret Thatcher paid a call. The queen would have invited the prime minister to sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up until an exasperated Mrs Thatcher asked whether or not this was protocol, to which the queen replied: ‘No, no. It’s just fun being Queen.’7 However, Central was opening a new £21m complex in Nottingham the following week, with the Duke of Edinburgh as guest of honour, and they ruled that it would be discourteous to broadcast a hideous puppet caricature of his wife so close to the ceremony.
Lloyd wanted short, topical sketches and as floor manager he wanted the freedom to make last-minute changes to keep up with the day’s news; but Hendra, the initial winner in this struggle, envisaged a series of running sitcoms, including scenes from a retirement home for ex-prime ministers, where Macmillan, Home, Wilson, Heath and Callaghan hung out. It did not work because the fun of watching the puppets was in the initial shock of recognition; their range of facial expression was too limited to sustain the joke for more than a few minutes at a time, and the critics panned the first show. Lloyd then won his fight with Hendra, and the long gags were dropped in favour of quick-fire sketches. Fluck and Law had wanted the whole show to be political satire, but that ambition was a casualty of the need for a large number of gags. Though the writing team included Ben Elton and Ian Hislop, there were not enough writers who understood politics and could be funny, so show-business and sports personalities were included in the show’s list of targets. Even so, the main business of Spitting Image was ridiculing and insulting the nation’s political leaders with a venom that had never been seen before on television. The most famous sketch showed Thatcher – whose voice curiously, was supplied by a male impressionist, Steve Nallon – at a restaurant with her cabinet, who were portrayed as a group of grunting morons. Thatcher ordered her meat raw and when asked ‘What about the vegetables?’, she replied, ‘They’ll have the same.’
Sometimes the show’s attacks hurt their targets. David Steel was sure that his puppet, which was small enough to fit in David Owen’s pocket, went a long way towards undermining his standing as co-leader of the Alliance. A few celebrities, including Paul Daniels, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claire Rayner, were satisfyingly off ended, but others, to Fluck and Law’s great disappointment, were flattered by the recognition. ‘We were reliably informed that junior members of the Cabinet, and Shadow Cabinet, were absolutely delighted when their puppets appeared. It showed they were on their way up,’8 Law admitted ruefully. A tape of the show was delivered by Central Television each Monday morning to the House of Commons for the benefit of MPs who had missed it. The tabloid press soon switched from hostility to raving enthusiasm, and by the latter part of 1985 the quality press had caught on. One critic observed: ‘It seems like years since anybody really got down to the vital national tasks of corrupting the young, hurling mindless abuse and libelling politicians. For two decades, nobody seemed to do anything really gratuitously disgraceful – until Spitting Image.’9
The one sensitive area continued to be the royal family. For a year, they left the Queen Mother out of it, until her absence looked like a loss of nerve. Then in February 1985 an executive from Central TV let slip in an interview with the Birmingham Daily News that he personally had long resisted having her puppet included, but the battle had been lost. This set off a firestorm of tabloid outrage, with the Daily Express urging its readers to switch off their televisions. The team had a sketch prepared in which the Queen Mother was to have been seen, Assisi like, talking to animals, except that she was asking the horses for racing tips – but it now seemed tame after such hype. Lloyd came up with a stylish solution. The show went ahead and, until thirty seconds before the end, it appeared to everyone that they had lost their nerve and cancelled the Queen Mother’s appearance. Then up came large letters, filling the screen with a message thanking everyone who had rung in to complain and assuring them that ‘Spitting Image has never made such a puppet and were on holiday when it wasn’t made. Thank you.’ Then on staggered the Queen Mother, declaring: ‘Oh, what a pity. I was so looking forward to it.’10 That evening, the show that Express readers had been exhorted to switch off reached an audience of 11.4m.
Though Not the Nine O’Clock News and Spitting Image gave a substantial number of previously unknown performers their first break, there were always more aspiring comics than television needed. Others had to make their way by doing stand-up routines in the clubs, pubs and student bars in the hope of being recognized. Anyone living in or near London who wanted to be a comedian beat a path to a club called the Comedy Store, which opened in 1979, the address of which could be found in London listings magazines. Anyone could turn up, make himself or herself known to the compere, and go up on stage to do a turn. If the audience did not rate the performer, which they usually did not, the call went up for the gong to sound and the performance was over. Some determined characters came back week after week for a repeated humiliation.
It was, of course, impossible to impose any quality control, so the better performers shift ed to the Boulevard Theatre, and set up Comic Strip, which became a test-bed for comedy that assumed an audience of liberal, anti-racist, anti-sexist, Guardian-reading, Thatcher-loathing young professionals, who would not be off ended by swearing or sexual explicitness, but would object to racist or sexist humour. The master of ceremonies was – to quote one critic – ‘a human volcano called Alexei Sayle . . . possessed of a Michelin body, a very loud voice, and a brain that only works on overdrive’, whose idea of pandering to his audience was to announce that the evening was to be a charity event in aid of ‘Help a Kid – Kill a Social Worker’. The same critic was impressed by ‘two young women called French and Saunders, whose effective humour derives from the accurate observation of some so far underexamined social stereotypes’.11 When this was written, Dawn French was twenty-three and Jennifer Saunders twenty-two. They were daughters of RAF officers, who had spent part of their childhood on the same RAF base, though they did not know each other until they met on a course for drama teachers. When they graduated, they developed a ‘cringeworthy’ stage act called ‘The Menopause Sisters’.12
The driving force behind Comic Strip was Peter Richardson, the leading half of a stand-up comedy duo with Nigel Planer, who was both funny and equipped with a sharp business brain. He seized the opportunity offered by the planned launch of Channel 4 by negotiating a deal for six half-hour films, the first of which was Five Go Mad in Dorset, a pastiche of the Enid Blyton novels the comedians had read as children. The cast included Richardson, French, Saunders and Ade Edmondson, another product of the Comic Strip reviews, where he appeared in a double act with Rik Mayall. Another forty Comic Strip films of varying length and quality followed over the next decade, each artistically controlled and starring Peter Richardson. The most memorable was The Strike (1988), which retold the story of the miners’ strike as a romantic adventure in Hollywood style.
The BBC was also open to the idea of giving airtime to these new ‘alternative’ comics and commissioned a series – The Young Ones – based on some draft scripts co-written by Rik Mayall and his then girlfriend, a young American named Lise Mayer. They used the standard sitcom format, but took it to extremes never seen on television before. The characters were like a dysfunctional family – a father figure whose plans for self-betterment never worked, a put-upon housewife and two uncontrollable egocentric teenagers – except that these were four students from Scumbag College. One of
the retarded teenagers, played by Rik Mayall, purported to be an anarchist, but was too cowardly and self-regarding to stand by his beliefs when the going was tough – ‘a two-year anarchist whose dad is probably a bank manager and he’ll probably end up one too,’13 as Ben Elton described him. The other was a psychopathic punk played by Ade Edmondson. The mother figure was a depressed hippie named Neil, played by Nigel Planer, forever preparing meals of lentil stew. There was also Mike, the self-appointed leader of the squat, who should have been played by Peter Richardson, but he was accustomed to having artistic control of everything in which he appeared, thus provoking an irresolvable personality clash with the series director, Paul Jackson. The part therefore went to Christopher Ryan. Finally, there was not one landlord, but an entire ghastly landlord family called Balowski, each member of which was played by Alexei Sayle.
The series ran from 1982 until the twelfth episode in 1986, when the whole cast went over a cliff in a stolen bus. There were no recognizable plot lines, nor did the series pay regard to plausibility. There were musical interludes, when the sitting room suddenly metamorphosed into a stage for Madness or Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and there were wacky and oft en tasteless cutaways. In one episode, two rats that infested the student hovel are heard discussing Euripides, until Rik spots them and kills one by smashing it with a guitar. In the next cutaway, the surviving rat is seen eating his former companion. This was crudity of a kind not seen before on mainstream television, and it was not to everyone’s taste. The show owed a comic debt to Spike Milligan; he was not flattered, however. He once said: ‘Rik Mayall is putrid – absolutely vile. He thinks nose-picking is funny and farting and all that. He is the arsehole of British comedy.’14 That, of course, was part of his appeal to the young target audience. Mayall rivalled Rowan Atkinson as the most popular comic of his generation.