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Into London tonight to see the Spitting Image stage show. I’d been charging the electric car all day, but for some reason it had decided to stop charging at around 40%, which was technically enough to get us into town and back (a whopping 104 miles was promised and unlike our old car, the predicted mileage is usually close to what you’ll get), but added a little layer of jeopardy to the enterprise, especially when I took a surprising number of wrong turns. I was a bit tired and the sat nav had offered us an alternate route to avoid something on the A1M. But instead of getting us to the M1 I somehow contrived to get us back to the A1M via a very circuitous route, involving, right at the end, a wrong turn on to the M25 which almost proved disastrous as we narrowly avoided a huge tailback at the next junction.
Anyway I was still confident we could make the return without needing to find a charger, but it still made for a slightly tense return journey (we had 31 miles left in the end. I could have gone back into London again, as long as I didn’t take a ridiculous detour).
It was the opening of the Spitting Image show and it was star-studded. I sat behind former cricketer David Gower and saw him eating an ice cream. He was sitting next to cricket fan and now commentator Andy Zaltzman and it was rather nice to think that these two are now friends. Jismy Cunt was apparently in the house too, though I don’t think his puppet featured in the show (but there were so many that I might have missed him). The puppets were, as you’d expect, amazing and I particularly enjoyed the cabinet depicted as insects and bats and though a lot of the jokes were quite route one and the references a little anchored in the 80s (which was surely a decision made by the writers to acknowledge the roots), it was exactly the kind of stuff likely to appeal to the Spitting Image fan, who would probably be someone in their fifties or sixties, who wants to laugh at Greta Thunberg say “he, she or them” or laugh at the idea of someone identifying as something else. To be fair the show balanced up some mild political correctness with some hope for equality and understanding (only sometimes having its cake and eating it) and towards some end, some proper satirical bite towards the people who’ve got us in the mess we’re in. It was a convoluted and maybe unnecessary plot, but like I say, lots of puppets and some brilliant caricatures and puppetry and occasionally ti was enough just to see the puppets acting in exactly the way the person would. Those rubber faces are surprisingly expressive.
But the show had Nigel Farage talking about his knackers (plural) and he later displayed them both. But Nigel Farage is, like me, a proud monoball - I hope to form a party with him and Hitler and Lance Armstrong and Graham Linehan one day, thanks to our shared status - and so for me, this mistake made the whole production invalid and they should have to start again.
It’s very hard to do a topical show when the news cycle is moving so fast (if you listen to the recent RHLSTP you’ll know that Al and the other writers had already had to rip up previous editions of the show and start again) but it did incorporate a few ultra topical lines (which would have to be recorded and inserted as the entire show is on tape), though the basic format of it being about the Coronation already felt slightly out of date and so there can be only a limited run for this incarnation of the project.
Spitting Image is a part of my history and I’ve seen pretty much everything Al Murray (who co-wrote this) has done since 1987 and this one was in some puerile ways reminiscent of his early work, but you could never have imagined him getting access to the huge budget that this show must have and getting to put it on in the West End. Just thirty-six short years after I first saw him.
Again, our out of town residency and need to get back for the baby-sitter meant we had to forgo the aftershow party, but whilst others had the fun of drinking and taking cocaines (if they wanted to make it truly 80s), I had the greater pleasure of watching the miles tick down on my car and wonder if I’d make it home.
I’ve heard some of you are experiencing problems with Amazon Music so have asked Acast to look into this
