Amongst the formative experiences of my childhood are the trips I used to take to the workshop that produced caricature puppets for the topical 1980s TV show Spitting Image. For my US readers who are unfamiliar with this satirical juggernaut, think of it as SNL meets The Muppets. It was a weekly show, using brilliant foam-rubber likenesses of politicians and celebrities, in quickfire, sharp, and gloriously disrespectful skits.
When I was ten years old, my father made a tentative phone call to Spitting Image’s puppet workshop in the Docklands district of London. He explained that he had a son fixated on caricature, and asked if they would mind awfully if I popped along and saw what they got up to. With the kind permission of the obscenely talented caricaturists Peter Fluck and Roger Law, and the show’s outstanding producer John Lloyd, I used to poke around excitedly in the huge puppet storage room, and get under the overworked caricaturists’ feet as they sculpted a cast of grotesques.
Such visits became quite a regular occurrence, and eventually the head caricaturist, David Stoten, set me small drawing and sculpting projects to keep me occupied. David was a serious and kind young man, and the patience he showed me was truly remarkable. He and his workshop colleague Tim Watts went on to become successful animators, and a short film they made, featuring caricatures of Kirk Douglas, was nominated for an Oscar. Without the encouragement and tutelage I received at Spitting Image, I’m not sure I would have pursued a career as a caricaturist, and Lloyd, Fluck and Law changed my life immeasurably with their random act of kindness.
There’s no doubt that the show’s creators were acutely aware of the rich history and heritage of the British, satirical tradition in which they worked. Even so, like everyone else at the time, I used to think of Spitting Image as a startlingly original concept. And in the context of TV, it certainly was. But when I began research for a book I wrote and illustrated, entitled The Gin Lane Gazette, I soon came to realise that the innovative Georgians had already blazed the trail over 200 years earlier.
From the mid-1760s, an enterprising chap called George Alexander Stevens delighted London and the provinces with his Lecture on Heads. This was a one-man show presenting satirical observations on a wide range of the people who comprised the nation’s ranks, professions, trades, and ruling class.
On a table set before his public, Stevens displayed a great number of portrait heads, rendered in wood and papier mâché, and each was representative of stereotypes that would have been very familiar to Georgian audiences. His performance was pitched as a pseudo-scientific exercise in physiognomy. Amongst the butts of his mockery were politicians from the coalition government, pettifogging lawyers, quack physicians, clergymen, fashionable ladies, prostitutes, the military, Billingsgate fishwives, academics, artists, stockjobbers, old lechers with their quizzing glasses, and various incarnations of Britain’s foreign neighbours.
Stevens took great delight in contrasting the head of the English archetype, John Bull, who had a ‘plain, honest, well meaning, manly sentiment speaking countenance’, with that of ‘Monsieur de la Grande Nation’, who was castigated for his ‘French grin and simper’. All manner of stock characters were caricatured for the public’s amusement, and Stevens imitated their voices and mores, peppering his shtick with indelicate wordplay. One critic gave the caveat that connoisseurs of wit and humour, ‘having such weak nerves that they were apt to faint away at the sound of a pun’, should not to attend a performance without having smelling salts on stand-by.
Stevens first gave his Lecture at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, in April, 1764, and it became so popular by 1772 that he once gave sixteen performances there in a little over a month. He also took the show on tour to many towns and cities, including Manchester, Bristol, Dublin, and Stratford-upon-Avon.
A spin-off book of the Lecture was published by Stevens in 1765, and it ran to several editions, many of which were pirated. The mighty Thomas Rowlandson, caricaturist extraordinaire, engraved the book’s frontispiece. The format of the Lecture was also plagiarised by some of the theatrical world’s more opportunistic performers.
The financial rewards Stevens enjoyed with his Georgian forerunner of Spitting Image were estimated at a considerable £10,000, and greatly improved both his circumstances and his reputation, which had hitherto been that of a feckless libertine and debtor, and of the maladroit author of numerous bawdy songs and obscene treatises. Until 1764, Stevens had been an unremarkable actor in the infinitely more famous David Garrick’s theatrical company at Drury Lane, and a member of many boisterous London clubs. He once threw a waiter out of a window, and then casually instructed the landlord of the house to add the loss of the poor bugger to his bill.
By the 1770s, Stevens seems to have been constructing, operating, and voicing life-sized puppets for the one-legged theatre impresario, Samuel Foote, who was famous for on-stage impressions of Georgian celebrities. Then, in about 1780, Stevens sold his hugely popular Lecture as a going concern to an actor called Charles Lee Lewes, but it was never as successful under its new management.
I was also delighted to find there was another example of performed Georgian satire that was a second forerunner of Spitting Image. This was the satirical puppet show of the actress Charlotte Charke. Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s Licensing Act was coming down hard on theatre that was deemed seditious at this time, but Charlotte’s show circumvented the law because no human performers were seen.
Charlotte’s Punch Theatre was to be found in St James’s, and she staged satires that she had penned herself, alongside others by the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding. She enjoyed some financial success with the enterprise, before exhaustion and sickness curtailed her endeavours. The cash-strapped Fielding seized the opportunity, and established his own puppet theatre under the alias ‘Madame de la Nash’.
As for my own more recent experiences with ‘performed satire’ (for the want of a snappier phrase), my professional life came full circle. Roger Law kept his eye on me over the years, and so when he revived Spitting Image on British TV, and in a live stage show in Birmingham and in London’s West End, I was recruited to churn out most of the caricatures on which the puppets were based. It was an honour and a privilege to work on a show that had directed the course of my career, and which was so steeped in a magnificent British tradition of satire and healthy disrespect for authority.
My favourite one so far. How amazing that they let you see behind the scenes at a young age. Wow.