Spitting Image, US Election Special, review: this toothless satire fails to land a single blow
Can satire work if it isn’t funny? That is the question posed by BritBox’s rebooting of Spitting Image, which features grotesque rubber parodies of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings etc but little in the way of living, breathing jokes. It’s latex all the way down, with scarcely a punchline-with-a-pulse to be discerned.
The results are especially grim in the case of Donald Trump, as an ineffectual and stultifying two-part US Election Special confirms (part one airs on ITV at 10pm this Saturday). Trump is his own parody, it’s often claimed. And in these episodes – released a minute after midnight to the world’s faintest drum-roll – the pointlessness of pastiching him is laid painfully bare.
Trump tampers with postal ballots in one skit. In other, he washes his wig and it is revealed that his self-aware colon has subscribed to BritBox. The colon is disgusting – I looked away – but what blows are landed?
So this American Election “special” is the very opposite. It doesn’t have a huge amount to do with the Presidential race either. The US stuff is sprinkled in amidst dull routines about Boris Johnson becoming possessed by Margaret Thatcher, and Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings – he’s an alien! – plotting a coup in a curry house.
Later, environmentalist Greta Thunberg pops up to fantasise about starring in a Fast and the Furious movie with Dwayne Johnson. The Johnson puppet looks like a 35 year-old Action Man toy lost down the back of a couch belonging to Roger Law, who co-created the original Spitting Image and is spearheading the revival.
And yet these sketches are side-splitting compared to the US election material. Joe Biden is portrayed as a grinning idiot taking his mission to empathise with ordinary Americans to extremes by working as a diner chef.
A grey Vice President Mike Pence, meanwhile, is a recycling of Spitting Image’s old gag about John Major being fashioned from purest cardboard. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is depicted as a show-room dummy. Which might be amusing if anybody, Donald Trump included, cared about Jared Kushner.
The original Spitting Image is held up as the gold standard for TV satire. In fact, it was more like an early Duran Duran album in that there were as many misfires as hits. But when it struck its target, it was a knockout. To be fair to its 21st century incarnation, it faces the additional challenge of lampooning figures essentially beyond parody – with Trump the obvious example. Even with that caveat, this is a toothless effort.
