Enoch Powell believed all political careers ended in failure. Between 1984 and 1996 they were even more likely to end in latex. Made by intemperate magazine illustrators, Roger Law and Peter Fluck, the Spitting Image puppets frequently supplanted in the imagination the politicians they satirised. President Reagan’s search for his missing brain predicted by many years his Alzheimer’s. Yet the show’s fantasies were wide of the mark as often as they hit it. John Major did not have a teenage crush on Virginia Bottomley. The man in blue underpants was having a torrid affair with Edwina Currie. Never mind. For many, Spitting Image was the only politics they knew. Mature politicians recognised that recognisability was all and claimed ownership. Roy Hattersley even maintained that the show was named after him because he was the only character who spat. The whingers were more often nonpoliticians such as Barry Norman, a film critic who complained about the wart he had been given on his forehead.

Critics praised ITV for bringing satire to television for the first time since That Was the Week that Was (indeed, there was nothing to touch it until Have I Got News for You in 1990). Stretching from the miners’ strike to the rise of Tony Blair, the show covered in rubber an incendiary era in British politics.

Public affairs are less nasty now and that may be a problem for Headcases. But the truth is that no one knows whether Spitting Image made the times more explosive or defused them with humour. Artistically, its finest hour came in 1987 when it depicted the Cabinet as Nazi youths singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me. It went out minutes after the polls closed, giving Mrs Thatcher another landslide. Headcases faces another challenge. In 1985 papers went into a spin at the prospect of a Queen Mum parody. Today it is hard to name a sacred cow. For that cultural change we have, of course, to thank Spitting Image.

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