Spitting Image on Kellyvision

Sometimes, someone tells you something on Twitter which strikes fear into any honest, fact-loving, archivist soul. When I posted this piece, tracing Chris Barrie’s appearances on Spitting Image in late-1987, I put bloody loads of research into it. I was confident I was correct, job done.

Until Gareth Joy mentioned the following to me on Twitter:

I must take another look at that Kellyvision episode about producing the ‘topicals’.

A year or two later, the Coleman puppet didn’t appear all series until a quick post-credits bit in the last show (and even then, it got cut off by the Central ident)

— Gareth Joy (@lookoutwales2) March 5, 2023

Kellyvision was a 1988 Tyne Tees series hosted by Chris Kelly, going behind-the-scenes of various TV programmes. Now, I’d most certainly heard of the show; an episode where they go behind-the-scenes on Knightmare is famous among that fan community. But I had no idea about the Spitting Image episode. If I had, I certainly would have investigated it before, I don’t know, publishing a huge article giving an exact timeline of how the show was made, or something.

Better late than never. Let’s take a look. This episode of Kellyvision was broadcast on the 20th July 1988, and is titled “The World of Spitting Image”. It’s worth taking the time to watch it in full; it’s a wonderful piece of television, and we don’t often do making-of programmes quite like this any more, at least on broadcast TV.

So: when was this episode of Kellyvision shot? And which episode of Spitting Image is it actually looking at?

Let’s see if we can figure things out. We’ll skip the early section at the puppet workshop at the Limehouse, which is a more general look at puppet-making, and could have been recorded at any time. Let’s instead leap to…

(6:25) Production Meeting
And we immediately get our first big clue – the Nigel Mansell/Golf sketch read out here is from the Spitting Image episode broadcast on the 22nd November 1987:

So what day is this production meeting taking place? Assuming this sketch is non-topical – and for reasons we’ll come to later, it must be – we can look to our old friend Tooth and Claw¹, and John Lloyd’s account of his working week:

“Tuesday is a very tough day. I’m still keeping an eye on the monitor while a huge pile of stuff from the writers accumulates on the fax machine. This is all for Show C stuff for the lunchtime planning meeting… There’s usually twenty-odd people at the meeting, essentially trying to determine what the script requires in terms of props, film, stills, sets and, of course, puppets.”

For the non-topical stuff, this is nearly two weeks before broadcast of the show; so this production meeting was probably on Tuesday 10th November 1987. As detailed in the previous article about this nonsense, Chris Barrie was still recording Series 1 of Red Dwarf on the 8th, so the clip of him in this production meeting may well be just two days after shooting on that finished. I get tired just thinking about it.²

Incidentally, I am extremely amused that instead of the tales of forced laughter we get from certain readthroughs – especially ones from the US – after this sketch, we simply get a weary: “Wow. Heavy stuff.”

(8:45) Handover
A very literal handover from the Limehouse in London, to Central’s studios in Birmingham. Very droll, Minister. Gaz Top’s introduction is important to note, though:

“It’s Saturday now, and the programme is due to be broadcast tomorrow night at 10 o’clock. However most of the show has already been recorded. But they leave a certain amount of the programme to be recorded at the last possible minute so those bits are topical.”

So what we’re about to see isn’t the production of the episode discussed in the meeting above, which is due to be broadcast in a week’s time. Instead, we’re headlong into the topical stuff for the episode due for imminent transmission.

(9:13) Production Meeting
The production meeting for the topical material takes place in Birmingham. Here they mention the “World Driving Championship” sketch, which is “all hopefully VO, apart from one shot of Nigel Mansell in a hospital bed”“. Which is this sketch, broadcast at the very end of the episode broadcast on the 15th November 1987:

So, this production meeting took place on the Saturday 14th November 1987, the day before transmission.

It is vaguely annoying that the two sketches they’ve decided to cover are both Nigel Mansell sketches – the golf one being the non-topical sketch, and the World Driving Championship one being the topical. It makes things a little more confusing than they need to be.

(10:30) Sound Studio
Ah, the vocal session. This, as detailed in the previous article, has two components: they record the non-topical material for the show due for broadcast in a week’s time, and then they record the topical material for the show transmitting the very next day. Here, we see the actual recording of the non-topical Nigel Mansell/Golf sketch. Like the production meeting above, this session would have taken place on the 14th November 1987.

And here is where we realise something brilliant: by complete coincidence, this Kellyvision episode is covering exactly the same period of time as we covered last time when we looked at Chris Barrie and his contributions to the series! And this vocal session is his first back after shooting Series 1 of Red Dwarf. Amazing.

(12:08) In The Studio
We then see the gang recording the Barry Norman Ishtar topical sketch, as broadcast on the 15th November 1987 episode:

The visual component of the topical sketches was shot on the day of transmission, so what we see here was recorded on Sunday 15th November 1987. As indeed was the following section, showing the recording of the British Caledonian Airways sketch – at the top is the mannequin of “Benson from Accounts”:

Oddly enough, we also see two sketches being recorded which end up in the show broadcast on the 22nd November 1987, rather than the 15th, despite this being the topical record day – the Stallone/Nielsen divorce sketch, and Frank Bruno suggesting unlikely people to fight:

Looking at the arrangement of the sets in the studio, it seems that all the material for Kellyvision was shot in one day – the topical record. Perhaps this material was recorded for possible inclusion in the episode broadcast the same day on the 15th, there wasn’t room, but found a place in the 22nd. Or perhaps the sketches were always intended for the 22nd, and they also routinely recorded non-topical sketches on the Sunday as well.

(16:23) Sound Post Production
Hmmmm. I am suspicious about this section. Here, we see Peter Rubery creating a sound effect for Alastair Burnet’s nose being rubbed against a boot. This section of Kellyvision was almost certainly shot on the 15th, along with the surrounding material in the studio, in the edit, and in Central presentation.

But the Burnet sketch doesn’t feel like a topical sketch. Back to John Lloyd talking about his week in Tooth and Claw:

“Everything has to be very tight through the week because we’re not only a long time in the studio but the post-production takes even longer. It takes two days to edit the show and another four days to dub the sound effects.”

This Burnet sketch does actually appear in the episode transmitted on 15th November 1987, but surely by this time, the sound dub on the non-topical sketches would already have been done. So I think Rubery is simply recreating the sound effect he made for the sketch the previous week, purely for the Kellyvision cameras – a suspicion which is only heightened by the the slightly artificial way Rubery performs his “realisation” about what they could use for the sound effect.

(15:42) VTR Editing
And into the final edit for that evening’s programme. We can see the topical Mansell sketch on the monitors, featuring Chris Barrie, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’re still looking at material shot on 15th November 1987:

I love how relaxed director John Henderson is here with the Kellyvision team, giving them time when he’s busy putting together a show for imminent transmission. It would be all I could do not to yell “GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY EDIT SUITE”.

(18:10) Transmission Control
And our final bit of proof that all this material was shot on the 15th November – we see the episode of Spitting Image actually transmitting from the heart of Central television, and the opening shot entirely matches up:

Cor.

In short: in that article about Chris Barrie’s availability, I was 100% entirely correct, and I’ve just spend 1,500 words and far too much of your time proving it. Don’t you just love me, this site, and life in general?

UPDATE (29/3/23): Here’s a grim but nonetheless fascinating little coda to this story. The very next episode of Kellyvision was broadcast on the 27th July 1988, and spent the day at ITN:

And which story broke late on in that day? The King’s Cross Fire, which took place on the 18th November 1987. That’s just three days after Kellyvision visited Central at Birmingham to watch the Spitting Image topicals being made.

Piecing this stuff together is quite satisfying, horrific subject matter not withstanding. In fact, it’s well worth watching the whole ITN episode anyway; one of the delights of Kellyvision is how it captures the prosaic nature much of television has, in the best possible way. In particular, the show is utterly unromantic about exactly what a royal photo opportunity actually is.

Absolutely no Alastair Burnetting going on here.

1. Dirty Feed is rapidly becoming a Tooth and Claw fan site. ↩

2. You will notice the qualifiers “probably” and “may well be” there. There is a very good reason for those. The production meeting which John Lloyd mentions above took place in Birmingham; the meeting above seems to take place in London, at the Limehouse. My suspicion is that the main production meetings simply moved from Birmingham to Limehouse in 1986/87, in part facilitated by the new sharing of producer duties between John Lloyd and Geoffrey Perkins. Perhaps Perkins could run the main production meeting at the Limehouse, while Lloyd stayed in Birmingham.

   There’s also this little hint in Tooth and Claw, which seems to indicate that moving the main production meeting to Limehouse was the eventual plan: “There were plans for improving communication all round, involving workshop people in planning meetings and suchlike, which should minimise the gossip and paranoia to which the enterprise seemed so prone.” Without further details about how the production worked in 1987, all the above is obviously just a best guess. But I highly suspect that if the meeting was shifted to a different day of the week, we’re only going to be one day out. ↩

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documentary, spitting image