Right now, I’m buried in a load of research on early Spitting Image. In particular, I have been carefully examining an original off-air of Series 1, Episode 11 (TX: 10/6/84), for reasons which will prove extremely interesting. But we’ll get to that in its own sweet time.
Instead, I want to talk about the two sketches in this episode before and after the ad break. Before the break we get our very first look at the puppet of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had hitherto just been heard off-screen. After the break, we get the ad parody “There’s an indifference at McGregor’s you’ll enjoy”, about the contemporary head of the National Coal Board, Ian MacGregor. The miner’s strike had started just three months previously.
Below is the sequence as presented on the DVD, released in 2008:
The link the sketch draws between the Scottish-American MacGregor, and applying certain American business practices to the UK, gives it a little more depth than a fair number of ad parodies manage.
While it’s obvious that the McGregor’s sketch is a McDonald’s parody, and of a very famous ad campaign which had been running for years, it’s still startling to compare an ad from the actual campaign, and realise the jingle really is virtually identical.
Finally, let’s take a look at this sequence in Spitting Image as it originally transmitted – ad break fully intact – on LWT in 1984:
And all of a sudden, what the production was doing with the McGregor’s sketch is obvious. By putting it at the start of Part Two, it’s right up against a load of other ads, and feels part of them. I highly suspect that it’s only the Spitting Image logo at the beginning keeping the thing compliant with IBA rules. What was merely amusing on DVD starts to feel genuinely subversive when viewed in its originally broadcast form.
Now sure, if you’re actually thinking about the material, you could make the link anyway. It is easy to forget that back in 1984, you didn’t tend to get trailers for other programmes during the centre ad breaks like you do now, which would completely ruin the effect. But if you did remember that, you could easily put two and two together and understand what the programme was up to.
But it’s one thing knowing that logically. It’s another actually seeing the effect it has on the show. It’s the difference between having merely having the facts at your disposal, and feeling them. Original off-airs for Series 1 of Spitting Image are very difficult to come by. Things like this give me a new appreciation for just how cheeky the show was being at this point.
And it’s a reminder that when making comedy, you need to consider how everything feeds into it. Context is vital. If you can get the format of your chosen medium to add meaning which is impossible to achieve in any other way, then so much the better.
With thanks to Nigel Hill for the original recording of this episode of Spitting Image.
One comment
Smylers on 29 May 2022 @ 10pm
Definitely. There’s a ‘The Simpsons’ episode where Marge says something along the lines of “I’m going to sit here and think about products I want to buy”† right at the end of an act — which I definitely felt was missing something when shown on BBC2. It would’ve been worth the channel being allowed to show an advert there just for artistic integrity.
So when Channel 4 acquired the rights, I thought the episode would be improved by having adverts in the middle of it.
Each ‘The Simpsons’ episode has 3 acts, presumably with an ad break between each in America. Channel 4 just inserts one ad break, either between acts 1 and 2 or between acts 2 and 3; it varies between episodes. And in the episode where Marge closes an act by saying something about buying products? Channel 4 inserted the ads at the *other* act-change in that episode, leaving Marge’s comment just continuing right into the start of the next act, like it did on BBC2. Bah.
† Sorry, probably a long way off the actual words. I tried a web search for the quote before writing this, but that just throws up sites selling Marge Simpson merchandise.
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