Spitting Image - Best Political Comedy Ever

Another quirky challenge from the Unpaid Pundits this week:

Which comic/humorist in history has gotten the best knocks on politics and government - has picked it apart best for both humor and critical benefit?

Unfortunately, I suspect my American colleagues have never seen the show that took political satire to undreamed of heights and remains the standard to which all others must aspire. Spitting Image ran for over a decade during the years of Conservative rule in the UK, and was without doubt a major influence in their eventual demise and the dethroning of Margaret Thatcher. Find more on the show here and here.

Spitting Image was a show featuring incredibly well done charicature latex puppets and they lampooned everyone from Ronald Reagan (The President's Brain is Missing) through to the Queen and Pope John Paul II. Voiced by some of the best impressionists then available and scripted by the cream of British comedy writers, the show was unstoppable and everyone watched it - politicians would have tapes made of the show and rushed to the Commons so that they could see what the burning issues of the next week would be.

Centre stage (as only to be expected from a topical satire show) were the politicians, in particular Mrs. Thatcher, who was portrayed as a bullying, fascist, bald male tyrant, and Ronald Reagan (a bumbling, nuke-obsessed fool with a (literally) missing brain). Providing admirable support were Bovver boy Norman Tebbit, bland-as-sand Geoffrey Howe, raving loony Michael Heseltine, scandalous Cecil Parkinson, Leon Brittan, Nigel Lawson, Norman Fowler, Douglas Hurd (he of the Mr. Whippy hair-do), slug-like Kenneth Baker and, on the other side of the House, the verbally unstoppable Neil Kinnock and the actually spitting Roy Hattersley.

Everyone has their favourite segments, like the time the Queen visits the cigarette paper factory and asks the stunned manager if the large papers are for making really big reefers or the infamous Maggie and Ronnie "phone sex" bit. Two in particular, however, aired just as the leadership elections were coming up for the Conservative Party and ensured that no-one in her Cabinet would be able to support Thatcher's re-election without ending their own career prospects and their own self-images.

The Thatcher cabinet are sitting in a restaurant. The waiter asks Margaret Thatcher for her order and she replies "Raw Meat". The waiter then asks "And for the vegetables?" to which Thatcher replies "Oh, they'll have the same".

Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan are standing at the men's urinal in a single sex toilet and Margaret Thatcher walks in and goes to the toilet next to them standing up. After she leaves Howe turns to Brittan and confides 'I can never go when she's in here'.

Two short segments which said that anyone in her cabinet who supported her was to be seen as an unmanly vegetable...and everyone in the country knew it. She was finished.

Oh, if only the US had it's own version, with as much guts and bite, right now.