Has Spitting Image ever been funny?

Thank you, Spitting Image, for the nostalgia trip! Your new series on BritBox has rekindled with almost Proustian fidelity those feelings I used to get every single time I watched the show back in my lost 1980s youth: the bathos; the disappointment; the frustration; the despair; the perpetual astonishment that puppet caricatures full of such satirical promise should so unfailingly and relentlessly be let down by such a leaden, insight-free script.

Yes, we all remember the puppets: Margaret Thatcher in her chalk-stripe business suit; Norman Tebbit in his leathers; the hacks represented by wolves. But can anyone recall a single line from any episode that made them laugh, ever? I can’t. In fact the only script I remember at all — and it sticks in my head because I hated it so much — was the one that went: ‘I’ve never met a nice South African.’

By ‘South African’, it of course meant ‘white South African’. Every one of them, it wittily, japesomely, satirically invited us to agree — comedy of recognition! — was a disgusting, hateful, racist bastard.

But I didn’t agree. I felt cheated. First it wasn’t funny — just gratuitous, unfair invective of a kind that would cause deserved outrage if applied to almost any other country or race. Second, it was arrogantly presumptuous in its assumption that every right-thinking person held this sneering view. ‘If this sketch doesn’t make you laugh, then maybe you’re part of the problem’ it seemed to be implying.

Now the series has been revived for BritBox — a joint BBC/ITV subscription channel rival to Netflix, on which you can watch all your favourite old classics, apart from the ones that, for your own good whether you like it or not, have been airbrushed from history like On the Buses, Mind Your Language, It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, ’Allo ’Allo!, etc — and the satirical edge is as blunt as ever.