Spitting Image and Pre-Televisual Political Satire: Graphics and Puppets to Screens

Abstract

In this article, I read the satire TV show "Spitting Image" as a virtual archive of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century graphic satire (John Gillray, George Cruikshank) and nineteenth-century street puppet-theatre (Punch and Judy). Though innovative as satire TV, "Spitting Image" remediated the style of Georgian visual satire as well as the conventions of nineteenth-cenutry puppet theatre. This reading thus counters non-historical analyses of the show that have approached "Spitting Image" as being disconnected from pre-televisual satires.