Britain Stringing Along

By Pico Iyer

Princess Margaret tipsily suggests that the new royal baby be christened Johnny Walker, then collapses in a drunken heap. The Pope comes on as just another hipster in wraparound shades, with a banjo and a Texas drawl. And Ronald Reagan spends most of his time in pajamas searching for his missing brain.

Such are the stars of Spitting Image, the British television program in which some 400 latex and foam-rubber puppets reduce the antics of the powerful to a mess of funny faces, pratfalls and spasmodic jerks. Breaking satirical ground and television rules with equal relish, the weekly show regularly strings along almost one in every four British men, women and children.

The great appeal of the free-for-all farce lies mostly in its outrageousness. Its sights are trained equally upon every sacred cow. During last year's Christmas special, for example, Prince Philip was shown clutching a bottle of liquor, with Princess Anne collapsed on his shoulder and a housewifely Queen sporting a button that read BAN THE BOMB. In another sketch, a wooden Prince Charles knocks forlornly on his wife's bedroom door, calling, "Does one want to do a jigsaw with one?" Prince Andrew's fiancee Sarah ("Fergie") Ferguson has already become one of the show's targets. And even the little princes William and Henry are depicted as ten-decibel hellions.

The fantastically unlovely gargoyles are the handiwork of Peter Fluck and Roger Law, who trace their roots back to the caricatures of the 18th century. For most of their careers the pair drew spiffing images of political figures for publications ranging from Britain's scurrilous Private Eye to the New York Times. These days, working in a converted banana warehouse along the London docks, the international lampooners produce what might best be described as the Muppets seen through Hogarth's eyes.

While the program's unmerciful skits have certainly turned plenty of heads in Britain, not everyone regards the product as a jolly good show. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who has been portrayed chatting with Adolf Hitler on immigration policies, saw the satire once and decided that she had seen enough. Many critics have complained that the show's cynicism is too easy and its script sophomoric. Almost everyone, however, concedes that the japery is nonpartisan. The House of Commons actually has a videotape of the show delivered each week.

Untiring in their efforts to get a rise out of their viewers, the pantomime's merry pranksters once flashed, for less than a second, a subliminal message that said, "Spitting Image scriptwriters are incredibly good in bed. Go out and sleep with one now." Even off the air-waves, the Image-makers have frequently made waves. The BBC, for example, refused to play the group's only recording, in which a make-believe Prince Andrew crooned I'm Just a Prince Who Can't Say No.

By now, the Spitting Image puppets have become so popular that thieves are taking out after them. First a $2,250 crumple-faced model of Thatcher disappeared, and then a jug-eared Prince Charles dummy. Both robberies, however, seemed only to vindicate the program's anarchic assumption: for citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands.

With reporting by John Wright/London