Spitting Image the complete Second Series - DVD Review

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Review

I’m sure most of you would’ve heard about Spitting Image so I don’t need to tell you too much about it, only that it was an ITV show that satirised modern day events and peoples with the use of cleverly and artistically well designed puppets.
I have fond memories of Spitting Image as a young kid, though looking back now when it was first aired in 1984 it was obviously the fun looking puppets I was interested in as I was just two years old, the political humour must have gone over my head.
Fortunately Spitting Image continued until 1996 when I was fourteen so I was able to appreciate a lot more of the clever comedy at work rather than just the puppets messing about on screen.

Series Two aired in 1985 and continued its political thrust from Series One - most of the sketches centered on Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan but an increase in the number of casual celebrity sketches and those featuring the Royal Family really improved the balance of the show. So upon tucking into the first couple of Episodes I was quite perplexed as to why I wasn’t finding it very funny. I suddenly started to wonder if my memories of the show were funnier than it were originally, or that the jokes were so dated that they just didn’t resonate anymore.

Well thankfully that was not the case because from Episode three onwards the series mysteriously becomes funny again and the humor I remembered came back. I was quite glad about that as I had another eight episodes to sit through before I could review it. As mentioned before the show’s key feature at the time was the use of puppets and voice impression which meant the show could act out jokes about figures such as Thatcher, Regan, Gorbachev, Charles and Diana – rather than just tell jokes about them, this is course makes a great difference as you are effectively seeing things in first person as regard to a spoken joke being more third person.

Series Two has some great moments for you to enjoy; the famous Thatcher & the Vegetables sketch being the highlight of course, but there are plenty of others that will tickly your fancy, but don’t go expecting to laugh your socks off. With great voice impressions from Chris Barrie and Harry Enfield amongst others, you can’t help but enjoy the sketches that are really observant and well written.

So part from the first two episodes I can recommend Spitting Image series two if like me you remembered it being funny and wouldn’t mind seeing it again, it probably wouldn’t be that funny for those who are too young to remember Thatcher, Regan and the marriage of Charles and Diana though.

Overall the video quality is fair, having been recorded fairly cheaply at the time the show doesn’t stand up well to recordings nowadays, but everything is clear enough but they’d be no point trying to upscale this to high def quality. Likewise the sound is a bit old and dry and isn’t likely to be amazing through your Dolby Cinema Pro Amazing High Def Plasma speaker system, but then you only really installed it to impress your friends and neighbours in the first place, I know you just watch everything on your Nicam TV when no one is around.


The main frustration for me is the inclusion of the original commercial breaks pauses, why have a static screen for 10 seconds to represent the commercials break when there is evidently not going to be any commercials, it would’ve been much better to edit those out – after all, I’m sure ideally the show creators would’ve loved to air the program with no interruptions but as it was on ITV there was no choice, but now twenty years later there is a choice, and frankly they’ve made the wrong one. Other than that, a fun trip down memory lane for fans of comedy satire or lovers of latex puppets.

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