The Lady is for returning …

 

Steve Nallon as Margaret Thatcher. Photo © Kasia Kowalska
Steve Nallon as Margaret Thatcher, watched by Roger Law, right, one of the Spitting Image creators.  Photo © Kasia Kowalska. Click to enlarge

Spitting Image: From Start to Finish was launched in style at the Cartoon Museum in London last week, with an appearance by the late Baroness Thatcher.

Steve Nallon, the actor who voiced the Thatcher puppet in the TV series, brought his most famous creation back to life to open the show (click the link for a short video excerpt, courtesy of Oliver Preston).

The exhibition includes images of the satirical sculptures created by Peter Fluck and Roger Law – or “Luck and Flaw” as they were known – before Spitting Image hit our TV screens 30 years ago last week. They were a regular feature of magazines and newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s.

Heavily featured are preliminary pencil caricatures that were the templates for the show’s puppets. You can see sketches of all the major celebrities of the day alongside the Royal Family and Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet and political opponents.

The show also reunites some of the best-known puppets, including the Queen, Princess Diana, Mr Spock, Alan Bennett, Roy Hattersley (the only Spitting Image puppet regularly seen spitting) and, of course …

Margaret Thatcher puppet. Photo © Hilary Foster
Margaret Thatcher puppet. Photo © Hilary Foster

Procartoonists.org member Simon Ellinas, who was at the opening, told us: “As always with such shows, it’s the preliminary sketches and some complete caricatures that are of great fascination to us cartoonists. The stunning work of David Stoten, Pablo Bach and Tim Watts predominated and some early Fluck and Law models were on show.

“This is a definite date for your diaries for whenever you happen to be in London.”

The exhibition runs until 8 June. All material in the exhibition is © Spitting Image Productions Ltd, Spitting Image Archive

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