Spitting Image 2025 is funny, filthy, forensic and, on YouTube, a force for good
Spitting Image returns — and this time, there’s nothing to hold it back.
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Mary Whitehouse would have had only two words for it: Utter filth! Yes, Spitting Image has returned and, freed from the shackles of linear mainstream broadcasting, the gloves, the trousers and all bets, are off. YouTube is the new home of the show that brought us everything from surprising chart-topper The Chicken Song to the Queen Mother with a Brummie accent, via Douglas Hurd’s Mr Whippy hair and Mike Gatting’s unexpectedly high voice.
For 12 years from its debut in 1984, its gifted team – including the young talents of Harry Enfield, Steve Coogan and co – danced around the guidelines of analogue broadcasting and the nerves of its commissioners. As co-creator Roger Law said to me this week, “People in TV never knew what hit them.” Now, following a TV reboot in 2020 and a live stage show two years ago, it’s hitting us again.
The budget is smaller, the characters fewer, but the subtitle, The Rest is Bulls**t!, points to its timeless acuity in lampooning the political, cultural and royal scenes. Curtains open on the Oval Office, where Trump and Putin are – this being a family magazine, I will only say… ensconced. A neat meeting of topical ideas sees politicians and puns fly around the F1 track with a cracking pay-off. Prince Harry and Paddington share a podcast. The show’s PR company claims that its debut episode has racked up 12 million views across social media platforms in the two weeks since launch. The puppets have clearly reached their people. Is this good or bad?
Please note: the following contains swearing.
Now 20 years old, YouTube remains the Wild West of entertainment platforms, with 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, and minimal content regulation compared with traditional broadcasters. It’s where millions of pixels are never watched, but also where stars are created. The current chart-topper is philanthropic prankster Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson (“Who?” you cry), with a whopping 399 million subscribers. There’s a whole world out there we only catch a glimpse of.
Sometimes, it’s where silenced or cancelled people go to be heard and seen again. I dipped into ex-Good Morning Britain’s Piers Morgan’s show Uncensored, and ex-GB News’s Dan Wootton’s Outspoken. Morgan was asking veteran US commentator Bill O’Reilly if Brigitte Macron was a man or a woman. To his credit, O’Reilly refused to engage: “I don’t go in the swamp.” Meanwhile, Wootton was busy espousing another outlandish Harry ’n’ Meghan theory. As Danny Baker is wont to say, this is surely what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he legged it down to the patent office. Or, as my father often lamented, “From the moon landings to this.”
But, just like the rest of the internet, YouTube has no inherent soul; it is whatever we make it, and there are gems, too. Channel 4’s Time Team was axed in 2014 after two decades, but fans can still tune in to see their favourite archaeologists at work. Better, because it’s all interactive, viewers can vote on future digs and follow progress virtually. Time Team series producer Tim Taylor told RT: “We had an email from someone in the States saying, ‘I’m 4,000 miles away, but it feels like I’m there.’” This isn’t a cynical money-grab for clicks, rather it’s a community built on passion. Whatever the platform, we do still recognise and value the difference.
Spitting Image’s aim was always, Roger Law explains, “Using old caricature skills and new foam rubber to find a way of telling the truth.” Forty years later, the show’s co-writer Matt Forde (who also voices Trump, Keir Starmer and Prince Harry) says this remains its north star. He tells RT: “It’s outrageous, silly and daft, but it wouldn’t work if people didn’t recognise truth in the satire. We don’t just enjoy jokes like this, we need them more than ever.”
He’s right. Spitting Image 2025 is funny, forensic and, on YouTube, a force for good (and filthy).
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Spitting Image is available now on YouTube.
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