Obsessively Tracing Chris Barrie’s Movements in Late-1987

While watching a 1987 episode of Spitting Image the other day, something rather odd occurred. And something odd occurring during an episode of Spitting Image has rapidly turned into this site’s speciality.

A bit of background first. In 1986, the show took to frequently featuring a Kenneth Williams puppet, for some reason. A typical appearance is in Episode 4, broadcast on the 26th January 1986, where he’s parachuted into the Tory cabinet:

The unmistakable tones of Chris Barrie providing the voice are… well, unmistakable. And utterly delightful.

Which makes it all the more peculiar that the following year, in the second episode of the series on the 8th November 1987, we get the Kenneth Williams puppet with a distinctly un-Chris-Barrie-sounding voice. (People with keener ears than me identify it as Steve Nallon.)

Chris Barrie had been with Spitting Image from the very beginning. If Barrie is working on your show, and had done a brilliant Kenneth Williams impersonation in the past, why would you suddenly not use him here?

Answer: because Chris Barrie didn’t work on that second episode of the series. Or indeed the first episode the previous week, on the 1st November. But he is present for Episode 3 on the 15th November, and for the rest of the series. What gives?

The answer comes in that little show called Red Dwarf. Specifically, the very first series of the show. Let’s take a look at the recording dates for that series; we’ll do it in recording order rather than broadcast order to make things easier:

Now the key thing to remember with Spitting Image is that it was a topical show, recorded close to transmission. And so things are immediately obvious when it comes to Barrie being missing for the first episode of Spitting Image of the series, broadcast on the 1st November – he was recording “Me²“. But why was he missing for the 8th November episode? Was he just taking a week off before going back to work?

Not quite. For the answer, we need to know a little bit about how Series 1 of Red Dwarf was made. Because Red Dwarf‘s final day of production wasn’t the 1st November. The series had a full extra week of production. I go into more details of this in this article, but the crucial bit is in The Beginning documentary on the 2007 Red Dwarf DVD release The Bodysnatcher Collection:

ROB GRANT: At the end of the recording of the first series, we had a spare recording day – including a day’s pre-VT – so we could do a whole other show.
PAUL JACKSON: I knew it was there. And I think I maybe even discussed with them [Rob Grant and Doug Naylor], you know, we might have to do a seventh script, and that wasn’t really very practical. So we devised this rather cunning plan of using that last week to go back and do pick-ups for the rest of the series. And again, because the BBC worked in these blocks and then didn’t really monitor it very carefully, nobody noticed, in effect. And we just delivered six.

Most of these reshoots were to pep up the first episode of the series, “The End”. Regardless, this means that there was an extra week’s rehearsals for Series 1 of Red Dwarf, followed by a pre-record day, and then an extra audience record on – fanfare please – the 8th November 1987. The same day Episode 2 of that series of Spitting Image aired, and the source of our Kenneth Williams sketch without Chris Barrie which kicked this whole mystery off.

So there’s our answer. Chris Barrie was missing from the first two episodes of the 1987 series of Spitting Image, because he was still working on Red Dwarf. In the first missing week, he was shooting “Me²“, and in the second week, he was re-recording huge chunks of “The End”. But he finished working on the show in time to join Spitting Image for its third week of production, right?

Well, nearly.

*   *   *

Because the above is the simple version. But you don’t really want that, do you? Strap yourself in, though: this gets complicated.

If you look closely at the third episode of Spitting Image‘s 1987 series, transmitted on the 15th November – the first one Chris Barrie appears in – you’ll spot some oddities. For instance, at this point in the show, Kinnock’s voice was usually done by Barrie. But in this episode, it clearly isn’t – in fact, it sounds distinctly like Rory Bremner:

For comparison, here’s a Kinnock sketch broadcast in Episode 5 on the 29th November, which is Chris Barrie:

And yet as previously mentioned, Chris Barrie does appear in the 15th November show. Here he is, unmistakably doing Coleman:

Why is he in some sketches that you’d expect him to be in, but not others? How do we deal with this Schrödinger’s Barrie, if you will?

For the whole story, we need to consider exactly what kind of show Spitting Image was. Let’s take a look at Lewis Chester’s Tooth and Claw: The Inside Story of Spitting Image (Faber, 1986), the bible when trying to understand the production of the show’s early years:²

“Spitting Image was nicely attuned to last minute inspiration. Although the bulk of Sunday’s show had to be shot by the previous Tuesday evening in order to complete the editing and dubbing stages in time, there remained an aperture for what were known as ‘topicals’. These comprised up to four minutes of material that had to go through all the production stages between early Sunday morning and transmission time.

In other words, while it’s true to describe Spitting Image as a topical show, this was managed in two different ways: most of the show was shot the same week of transmission, but up to four minutes of material was shot the same day as transmission, in order to really be up-to-the-minute.

Then there’s the other unusual aspect of how the show was made. When the show first started back in 1984, the voices were recorded at the same time as shooting the puppets, but this quickly proved impractical. Tooth and Claw again:

“A more significant leap forward in production terms was John Lloyd’s decision to pre-record voices. In the first three shows [in 1984] the puppeteers had provided the live voices and this had led to endless complications. It meant that every time a sketch was being shot there could be no sound in other parts of the studio. As Lloyd put it, ‘Chippies would freeze with nails in their mouths, one knee raised and boards on their shoulders.’ In a show that had to turn round up to thirty sets in three days with room for only four in the studio at any one time³, this was enormously time-wasting. With the voices pre-recorded, sets could be moved and repaired while shooting went on. It all made for a Breughel-type appearance in the studio but things ran much more efficiently. Instead of signalling a take with ‘Absolute quiet, please’, Keith Lascelles, the floor manager, would shout above the bedlam ‘Hold up your dollies, please’, or, in crisis, ‘Get ’em up’. The other advantage was that the voices became much better as the puppeteers could record them without the encumbrance of their puppets. It was also now possible to draw on good impressionists outside the puppeteers group.”

Reading that, you are perhaps inclined to ponder some of the problems such a production method must have caused as well. Once those words were recorded, you were effectively locked into them, with any last-minute inspiration in the TV studio with the voices now impossible. Still, the advantages must have wildly outweighed the disadvantages here. It is also amusing that with John Lloyd’s background in radio, Spitting Image essentially ended up being recorded like a radio show first, with the pictures added as the last step.⁴

Most helpfully, Tooth and Claw also details the production process for the last-minute topicals. These were written on Friday⁵, the voices recorded on the Saturday, and then shot and edited on the Sunday, in time for that evening’s transmission. It’s worth quoting John Lloyd’s account of his Saturday directly from Tooth and Claw here, to prove that I am interpreting this correctly. “Show B” is the episode transmitting the very next day, and “show C” is one transmitting in a week’s time.

“Saturday is my worst day of the week. […] My first job is to get the voices done for show C. It’s very pressurized work and and the director and I do it together. It takes about four hours to record the whole programme. […] After we’ve finished pre-recording show C, we start recording all the topical jokes for for show B.”

So each voice record consists of topical material for the next day’s episode, along with less topical material for the episode in a week’s time.

You can, I trust, see where I’m going here. The reason we have a Schrödinger’s Barrie for the third episode of the series on Sunday 15th November is that the main voice record for this episode was done on Saturday 7th November… when he was still busy with Red Dwarf. He was present for the voice record on Saturday 14th November… which consisted of the topical material for the episode transmitted on the 15th, along with less topical material for the fourth episode of the series, on the 22nd. And Barrie is indeed a fully-fledged member of the cast for the fourth episode onwards.

So, can we prove that the Coleman sketch above was part of the topicals? Yes we can. That episode mentions Bryan Robson winning “4-1 away from home”. This was the Euro qualifiers, Yugoslavia v England, which took place on the 11th November. This match took place right between the main voice record on the 7th, and the topical record on the 14th, proving this was one of the topical sketches.

For our final proof, take a look at these two Reagan sketches from the 15th November episode. This first one isn’t Chris Barrie – in fact, it sounds like Rory Bremner again⁶ – and was part of the non-topical record:

But this Reagan sketch was also broadcast on the 15th, and does have Barrie as Reagan:

And to tie it all together, the topical Coleman sketch and the topical Reagan sketch were shot using the same pink background, which feels like a nice bit of circumstantial evidence:

So there we have it. That’s why Chris Barrie is both present and not present in an episode of Spitting Image. Join me next time, when I rummage through his bins to retrieve a Brittas Empire script.

With thanks to Tanya Jones, Darrell Maclaine, and @michael_sas.

UPDATE (6/3/23): Article updated, identifying our ersatz voice artists.

1. Each episode also had a pre-record day in the studio on the day before. ↩

2. Tooth and Claw technically only covers the show up until 1986. We are, of course, talking about episodes made in 1987. I believe it’s safe to extrapolate here concerning episodes which were made just a year later. I’d be a lot more wary about doing this with any of the 90s episodes of the show. ↩

3. This changed to eight sets after the first series, when the team got the use of the bigger studio in Birmingham. ↩

4. Something which equally applies to later producers like Geoffrey Perkins and Bill Dare. Indeed, this idea of Spitting Image as effectively a radio show first, and a TV show second, is a hugely underexplored one. ↩

5. The observant among you will notice a possible discrepancy between this account, and my account in the first part of my flash frames piece, where I claim that the writing of the flash frame happened on the Sunday, not the Friday. I stand by this claim: while most of the topicals were written on Friday, this was to give the production a couple of days to record the voices and get the puppets/sets ready. The flash frame needed no voices, puppets, or sets: just a caption, which can easy be thrown in during the edit on the Sunday. ↩

6. Although to be fair, it is a very good stab at sounding like Barrie’s version. An impression of an impression. See also: nobody does an impression of Robert Robinson, they do an impression of Fry & Laurie doing an impression of Robert Robinson. ↩

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