Undated handout photo issued by Mark Harrison/BritBox of Mark Zuckerberg in puppet form for the new series of Spitting Image, which is making a return to the small screen. PA Photo. Issue date: Wednesday March 4, 2020. Programme-makers said that "with the world getting smaller and more turbulent, the time couldn???t be more appropriate for an iconic British satirical take on global events." See PA story SHOWBIZ Image. Photo credit should read: Mark Harrison/BritBox/PA Wire NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.
If satire is dead, someone didn’t tell the script writers. That the real thing is too outrageous to be sent up is sometimes true, but the idea that there is no role for savage comedy is about to be tested to destruction.
Spitting Image, the world-renowned latex puppet show that started in the 1980s, is being re-launched in the UK.
The show seeks to hone in on the rise of personality-driven politicians, as a contrast to the last generation of blander fare. The challenge is that it must surmount the basic test of putting an original spin on the madness of the moment. So long as it can exploit the personalities as raw material, the role of master satirists beckons.
The show was cancelled in 1996 as a new type of centrist politics took hold across the West. Its founder Roger Law took to living in Sydney and flying to China to nurture an obsession with Chinese ceramics.
Having met him occasionally during that period, I would vouch that Mr Law has the strength of mind equal to the moment of making comedy out of the current crop.
Creators of 'Spitting Image', Peter Fluck, left, and Roger Law, in their London studio in 1986. Getty Images
The photos released of the latest generation of puppets look like great caricatures. In a recent interview, Mr Law was asked about the irony of him as a 79-year-old mocking the septuagenarian contenders for the White House. It is not much fun being old, he said, given that it takes about two hours to get going in the morning. The obvious jokes are out.
In the roughly 25 years between the two Spitting Image shows, there have been many commentators who examined the demise of the satirists' trade.
At its best, satire provides an outlet for the weak to share in a light-hearted stand against the powerful. But when moderates rule politics, there is no overpowering apex that imposes its will on the population. Politicians, instead, rely on so-called "nudge" techniques, which include positing ideas for the public and then developing campaigns around their compliance or uptake. The problem for satirists is that these techniques are antithetical to their art.
Political comedians have resorted to challenging these processes. But while television shows such as Veep, The Thick of It and Twenty Twelve were funny, they dealt primarily in riffs about language and small feud scenes among political staffers.
There has, however, been a cultural shift in recent years.
The British general election in 2015 was won on a slogan that, in hindsight, was ultra-ironic.
The vote was a choice between the Conservatives and five years of chaos with a fairly bumbling opposition leader called Ed Miliband. Mr Miliband did not help himself by carving his mostly unintelligible campaign pledges on a massive stone slab. The launch of the “EdStone” was a scene that the late film director Stanley Kubrick would have gleefully choreographed. But as it turns out, the Labour leader was beaten.
Labour leader Ed Miliband unveils Labour's pledges carved into a stone plinth in Hastings during general election campaigning in 2015. PA Images
And yet, the subsequent five years of Conservative rule have been plenty filled with chaos. The smooth-faced David Cameron was the victor in 2015. But even though he gleefully painted himself as the heir to former prime minister Tony Blair, he was forcefully retired by a referendum electorate just a year later, leading to a process that eventually saw flaxen-haired Boris Johnson rise to power.
In that same year, then US president Barack Obama made a fateful error of riding roughshod over his vice president Joe Biden’s presidential ambitions. Mr Obama wanted to throw his weight behind Hillary Clinton, who went up against Donald Trump, but her bid was shredded in the 2016 election.
Mrs Clinton’s achievements are many but she belonged to the satire-free zone, as did Mr Obama.
Mr Trump and Mr Johnson, on the other hand, are rich and ripe political characters. So, too, is Mr Biden, who is a living embodiment of the Warner Brothers' cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn.
US President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson are easier to caricaturise. AFP
For clues on how the new Spitting Image producers and writers plan to pitch their skits, it is perhaps useful to look at the work of the writer Michael Spicer.
In the Room Next Door social media series, he poses as a political aide providing earpiece guidance to leaders during speeches or interviews. The basic premise is Spicer guiding or shaping the message; in other words, he is not coming up with the message but channelling how it is coming across.
As a comedy technique, it rests on inverting the established rules. Even in the set-up, the politicians are, metaphorically speaking, hanging themselves by not following the script writers.
Spicer seized on the British interior minister Priti Patel repeatedly referring to "victims of counterterrorism" as she muddled her department's role in fighting terrorism and overseeing counter-extremism policy. In doing so, Spicer showed that there was still life in approaches that had been neglected since the heyday of Spitting Image, when it was dealing with former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former US president Ronald Reagan.
In the political mosh pit of the centre, political personalities are lost to sight of all but insiders and close observers. For the current heavyweights, the name of the game is to create their own political landscape. An outsized personality is key to forging these new realities. And it takes humourists, perhaps even rubberised puppets, to be an essential guide to true characters that are leading the way.
Damien McElroy is the London bureau chief of The National
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024. It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine. Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages]. The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts. With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians. Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved. Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world. The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Key findings of Jenkins report
Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna, "accepted the political utility of violence"
Views of key Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, have “consistently been understood” as permitting “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” and “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
Muslim Brotherhood at all levels has repeatedly defended Hamas attacks against Israel, including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians.
Laying out the report in the House of Commons, David Cameron told MPs: "The main findings of the review support the conclusion that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism."
Wear the right fabric for the right season and occasion
Always ask for the dress code if you don’t know
Wear a white kandura, white ghutra / shemagh (headwear) and black shoes for work
Wear 100 per cent cotton under the kandura as most fabrics are polyester
Don’ts
Wear hamdania for work, always wear a ghutra and agal
Buy a kandura only based on how it feels; ask questions about the fabric and understand what you are buying
Scores
Oman 109-3 in 18.4 overs (Aqib Ilyas 45 not out, Aamir Kaleem 27) beat UAE 108-9 in 20 overs (Usman 27, Mustafa 24, Fayyaz 3-16, Bilal 3-23)
Libya's Gold
UN Panel of Experts found regime secretly sold a fifth of the country's gold reserves.
The panel’s 2017 report followed a trail to West Africa where large sums of cash and gold were hidden by Abdullah Al Senussi, Qaddafi’s former intelligence chief, in 2011.
Cases filled with cash that was said to amount to $560m in 100 dollar notes, that was kept by a group of Libyans in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
A second stash was said to have been held in Accra, Ghana, inside boxes at the local offices of an international human rights organisation based in France.
Known as The Lady of Arabic Song, Umm Kulthum performed in Abu Dhabi on November 28, 1971, as part of celebrations for the fifth anniversary of the accession of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan as Ruler of Abu Dhabi. A concert hall was constructed for the event on land that is now Al Nahyan Stadium, behind Al Wahda Mall. The audience were treated to many of Kulthum's most well-known songs as part of the sold-out show, including Aghadan Alqak and Enta Omri.
Moon Music
Artist: Coldplay
Label: Parlophone/Atlantic
Number of tracks: 10
Rating: 3/5
What is graphene?
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged like honeycomb.
It was discovered in 2004, when Russian-born Manchester scientists Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov were "playing about" with sticky tape and graphite - the material used as "lead" in pencils.
Placing the tape on the graphite and peeling it, they managed to rip off thin flakes of carbon. In the beginning they got flakes consisting of many layers of graphene. But as they repeated the process many times, the flakes got thinner.
By separating the graphite fragments repeatedly, they managed to create flakes that were just one atom thick. Their experiment had led to graphene being isolated for the very first time.
At the time, many believed it was impossible for such thin crystalline materials to be stable. But examined under a microscope, the material remained stable, and when tested was found to have incredible properties.
It is many times times stronger than steel, yet incredibly lightweight and flexible. It is electrically and thermally conductive but also transparent. The world's first 2D material, it is one million times thinner than the diameter of a single human hair.
But the 'sticky tape' method would not work on an industrial scale. Since then, scientists have been working on manufacturing graphene, to make use of its incredible properties.
In 2010, Geim and Novoselov were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their discovery meant physicists could study a new class of two-dimensional materials with unique properties.
