ONLY A SPIT AWAY
Transatlantic satire and ‘Spitting Image’
Ian Macdonald interviews SPITTING IMAGE producer Geoffrey Perkins
Satire doesn’t usually travel. Last year David Frost tried a US revival of his ancient British format TW3, and flopped. On the other hand, he tried a US version of SPITTING IMAGE which won praise from the critics and top ratings. UK audiences also got a chance to see the US version DOWN AND OUT IN THE WHITE HOUSE (Produced by original Spitting Image producer, John Lloyd, and transmitted on ITV, 14.9.86) but they were less enthusiastic. Was it because the show lacked originality, preferring instead to use an overall storyline? Were the gags too different for us? Or was it because it was full of American characters who were just not know [sic] over here?
Primetime’s Ian Macdonald seriously endangered the lunchtime habits of SPITTING IMAGE (UK series 3) producer Geoffrey Perkins by grabbing him and gabbling several incoherent questions at him before he got out of the door – thus eliciting the following measured and eloquent answers…….
GP: You can easily be deluded with America into thinking that you’ve got the same sense of humour because you speak the same language, but then there’s that quote about the two nations divided by a common language; and the differences are actually massive. For example, the byline which promoted Monty Python’s LIFE OF BRIAN over here was “Makes Ben Hur look like an epic!”. In parts of America it was changed to “Makes Ben Hur look like a musical!”.
GP: It would be very difficult to do an international SPITTING IMAGE. SI is very popular in Holland, for example, but they also put subtitles on it explaining who everybody is and there would be logistical problems about doing a simultaneous version, say in America. As SPITTING IMAGE stands at the minute, we’re all based in Britain; and to make a topical show like the one we do over here, we’d have to be over there. It may well be that’s the direction that the American shows drift into, but at the minute the thought is to come up with a format or a variety of formats which mean that the show can actually be recorded some time in advance.
GP: The question of the strength of material is very interesting. One of the things over here is that people have become more and more used to it, and some of the things they objected to violently when the show started, they wouldn’t really bat an eyelid about now. The Royal Family’s a particular example. When it started in the very first show, the IBA pulled the Royal Family sketch which was at the core of the very first SI programme and left it very unbalanced, because they were desperately worried about doing the Royals at all. So – eventually we did the Royals and there was a furore, and that died down – and the next thing was “well of course they’ll never do Princess Diana, couldn’t possibly do that.” And after a couple of weeks of toying with the idea of having her talking behind a door, she came out – little bit of furore about that, and then nobody mentioned that [anymore]. And then the Queen Mother came out and there was all the furore about that. It got leaked that there was going to be a sketch about the Queen Mother, which in fact was not a desperately satirical sketch – quite silly really – the sketch was pulled because it just seemed in the light of all the controversy it was about to cause that it was actually a rather mild sketch. What they replaced it with was a rather elegant joke, which I think was John Lloyd’s idea; which was just having her come on at the end saying how disappointed she was that the puppet hadn’t appeared in the show„, That got a lot of complaints, interestingly from people who never saw the programme, but just gathered that she’d been on! And then of course we started turning her into a Beryl Reid type of character. So it does take time for people to get used to things [even] if the initial impression or us might be tremendously grotesque.
GP: I think there were splits at NBC, over DOWN AND OUT IN THE WHITE HOUSE. The part which had Teddy Kennedy offering a lift home to a woman at the party in Hefner’s mansion, so she says “Suddenly I feel like dancing” caused a lot of furore when it actually went out, And I know that there were some people there who virtually said if this show goes out I resign; but there were other people who backed it quite strongly. The only thing I can really think of actively being stopped was that we weren’t allowed to do a puppet of Mickey Mouse. Under no circumstances. Which was unfortunate because the original plot of DOWN AND OUT – which would have simplified things enormously – was Reagan running against Mickey Mouse. The problem with the [revised] plot was that you had to create the character of Uncle Sam, which was a bit more difficult.
GP: Frost appearing in real life was partly a contractual obligation thing; the show was sold by Frost in fact, who had an option at NBC to do three shows. He decided that one of the shows he’d try and do would be a version of SI. I think he actually worked out slightly better than everybody expected him to. The puppets themselves aren’t funny – they’re grotesque but they have no comic timing whatsoever, One of the rather nice things about Frost appearing was that you realise that he’s a very good timer of those sort of jokes. It suddenly made a little bit of an impact.
GP: The writers on DOWN AND OUT were the same as for SI, except for one American writer. The original thought was that they’d have some American writers over here to work on the show and stick in some American jokes, I suppose; but American writers work in a completely different way – certainly on things like sketches. They have a room full of 25 people, all of whom shout jokes at each other; and that’s very much not an English style. So they had this bloke who shouted for about a month, and in the end I think he had one line in the whole programme. The system that was used for writing the NBC show – which they’re continuing to use – is exactly the same as we used for the topical bits on SI. We used to meet on a Friday morning with a very small group; basically Bob Grant, Doug Naylor, Nick Newman and Ian Hislop – so DOWN AND OUT bounced off a little bit from past technique, used in the UK shows.
GP: We tried to play down the Englishness of the script. Obviously it came out in Press things about the show, but we were aware of how sensitive we would be to Americans coming over here and doing jokes about the British; so we certainly didn’t make a big thing about it. We used some English puppets as generic figures, like Claire Rayner as a scientist who gets her hand pulled off by Rambo Stallone. It was also quite interesting with the voices – a lot of the American attitude was ‘we’re going to have lots of American actors doing it because you can’t do American accents and so on’, and one of the examples they quoted was ‘you need more American guys in it like the bloke doing Reagan’. And we said ‘well actually that’s Chris Barrie, and he’s very English!’
GP: DOWN AND OUT was a probably a little bewildering for an English audience; there were a lot of jokes about American people who nobody over here would really know, like Lee Iacocca, and people like that. There are two other US SPITTING IMAGE shows which have just been done (one’s just gone out in the US), which are much more accessible for a British audience even though they haven’t been done with that in mind. The plots are a lot simpler than DOWN AND OUT. One is a parody of a domestic sit-com, based in the White House and called THE RONNIE AND NANCY SHOW, and the other is based around the Oscar ceremonies.
GP: DOWN AND OUT got some extraordinary reviews in the US, unlike SI when it first came out over here. Newsweek, for example, really did say this is a completely different type of television etc. It got quite a lot of complaints, but it did get a very positive Press reaction which slightly surprised everybody here, because I think we thought it would be at best very mixed. Very few people really took against it, apart from Rupert Murdoch’s papers! But there you go… It also did very well in the ratings terms. It was the top show in San Francisco and over on the West Coast, which is rather incredible.
GP: On the political front, I think NBC wanted some balance, and there were some interesting corporate decisions resulting from that. Almost the only thing that’s slightly wrong with THE RONNIE AND NANCY SHOW is a rather gratuitous sub-plot with the Democrats, and that’s really there for balance. I think you have to accept that the people who are actually in power are always going to come in for slightly more attack than the people who aren’t. And yet you can’t measure the real balance of jokes, so you can’t measure it in terms of time.
GP: The really interesting thing about satire and reality is shown in RONNIE AND NANCY. NBC got 260 complaints about it, along with 25 good comments; which made it the second most unpopular programme in a year. The most unpopular (according to the report in The Guardian), with 574 complaints and 14 favourable comments, was the News!
Geoffrey Perkins produced THE HITCH-HIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY for radio, and still writes and performs in RADIOACTIVE. He was script editor on SPITTING IMAGE before moving over to produce the 3d series. He is currently co-producer of SATURDAY LIVE.
Ian Macdonald
(from Primetime, v1n12, 1 April 1987. For more on the Queen Mother controversy, go here)
