Spitting Image: Making the puppets

"Sitting on The Tube in London, I would look at the way people talked."

How do you create the moving puppets seen in Spitting Image? Professor Spike Bucklow discusses the different skills involved in the journey from a joke to the finished moving foam puppets.

Spike Bucklow is a former Professor of Material Culture at the University of Cambridge and Conservation Scientist at the Hamilton Kerr Institute.

[steveleslie]

I always wanted a "Spitting Image" puppet...

[fbisurveillancevan]

I allways had a feeling Prince Philip was a puppet!

[alexc]

As a teen in the 80's/90's I thought that Spitting Image was a comedy programme. But when Blairs Labour party came into power they announced that the show would end because they didnt see that they would have the opportunity to take the piss out of the labour government!
For me this was an important moment because I realised then that most tv people in the UK were/are left wing activists and that spitting image had been trying to harm the conservative side of politics while pretending to just be a comedy show.
I will never forgive them for denying me sketches showing Tony Blair french kissing Gordon Brown, Two Jags Prescott dressed as a woman or a puppet showing Cherie Blair as a robot or something. That would have been just as funny as their sketches about Thatcher or John Major but when labour came to power in 97 they were so partisan that they couldnt bring themselves to insult their favourite party. Pathetic, really pathetic.