General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Spitting Image (2020 TV series)

Spitting Image (2020) was a British satirical puppet sketch show, a revival of the 1984–1996 ITV series of the same name, in which latex caricatures of politicians, royals, and celebrities lampooned current events. Announced on 4 March 2020 as the first original commission of the streaming service BritBox UK, it ran for two series of ten episodes each between October 2020 and December 2021, with specials also screened on ITV, before BritBox declined a third series in 2022.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	Saturday 3 October 2020, exclusively on BritBox UK, then weekly for 10 weeks⁴
Format	Two series of 10 episodes each (about 23 minutes), plus Halloween and Christmas specials screened on ITV²^•³
Creative leadership	Co-creator Roger Law returned to head the creative team; Jeff Westbrook (The Simpsons, Futurama) served as showrunner; produced by Avalon⁴
Puppet cast	Over 100 puppets developed for launch, including Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, The Queen, Joe Biden, Greta Thunberg, Elon Musk, and a personified Covid-19⁴
Cost	BritBox boss Reemah Sakaan described the show as "incredibly expensive"; each puppet reportedly cost around £10,000 to produce³
ITV reach	The 2020 election special drew a consolidated audience of 4.5 million, the highest-rated 10.00pm show on the channel in four years⁵
End	Axed in October 2022; BritBox said it would not air additional original commissions ahead of the ITVX launch³

Spoilers

Plot

Spitting Image has no continuing story in the way a drama does. It is a topical sketch show, and its "plot" is simply the news of 2020 and 2021, reenacted by puppets and pushed one step past decency. The first series opens in the middle of a pandemic year, with a Britain led by a shambling, self-satisfied Boris Johnson and a world led by a Donald Trump who has just tested positive for COVID-19, so recently that the premiere was rewritten at the last minute to fit the news in.

The first episode sets the tone with Trump outsourcing his tweeting to his own anus, a gross-out gag that tells the audience exactly what kind of show they have switched on: nothing is off-limits, and the jokes will go lower before they go higher. From there the series settles into a weekly rhythm of quick satirical sketches. Boris Johnson fumbles through the pandemic while Dominic Cummings, depicted as a creepy alien with a pulsating head, lurks at his side pushing crisps into his ear and asking whether the Prime Minister would sack him if he ate his baby. Priti Patel is a vampire and a dominatrix, keeping a scrotum-cheeked Michael Gove as her submissive punter. Dominic Raab karate-kicks his way through diplomacy in a nod to his real-life black belt. The Sussexes, Putin, Xi Jinping, Adele, Kim Kardashian, Greta Thunberg, and Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp all get their turn under the latex.

The show's speed is part of the act. Writers in two rooms, one in the UK and one in the US, turned sketches around so fast that some bits referenced events from as little as twelve hours before recording, an almost breathtaking turnaround when puppets have to be physically rebuilt for each new gag. The US election of November 2020 got a double-length special, with part one also broadcast on ITV, and a version released free on YouTube for American audiences who could not get BritBox.

The second series, airing in 2021, continues the same formula as the pandemic drags on and the news cycle keeps supplying material, with the puppet roster expanding to include Joe Biden alongside the returning Trump, Johnson, and Cummings. The series ran until November 2021 before BritBox ended it, bringing the puppet cabinet's second term to a close after 19 episodes.

The sketch people remember is the Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings alien scene. Johnson, puppeted as a bumbling, toupee-tousled ego, shares a scene with Cummings, rebuilt as a gray alien infiltrator wearing a gilet, his head pulsating as he speaks. The alien pushes crisps into his ear and deadpans a question about whether Johnson would sack him if he ate his baby, a joke that lands because it is only one degree away from how Cummings was actually reported to behave in Downing Street. It is the revival's signature image, praised even by hostile critics as the funniest thing in the early episodes, and it captures the whole show's method in one scene: take a power relationship everyone already finds sinister, and make it literal.

Characters

Boris Johnson (voiced by the Spitting Image voice ensemble) is the show's central British target, a foppish, blustering Prime Minister who treats every crisis as a performance opportunity.
Dominic Cummings is reimagined as a literal alien with a pulsating head and a gilet, the sinister strategist behind the throne, played for deadpan creepiness.
Donald Trump is the show's American engine, loud, orange, and, in the opening sketch, literally tweeting from his own anus; he returns through the pandemic, his diagnosis, and the 2020 election.
Priti Patel appears as a vampire and dominatrix, cruel and incoherent, with Michael Gove as her scrotum-cheeked, submissive sidekick.
Greta Thunberg is caricatured as an exasperated teenager surrounded by idiot adults, the choice that drew the show's loudest criticism.
The wider roster includes Putin, Xi Jinping, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Adele, Kim Kardashian, Jürgen Klopp, Joe Biden, and even a puppet of COVID-19 itself.

Interpretations and controversies

The revival's decision to satirize Greta Thunberg, then seventeen and autistic, was its most contested choice. Voice artist Jess Robinson defended the treatment as "a bit more affectionate" and said nothing touched her being autistic, and Thunberg herself liked the puppet image when it was first posted on Twitter. Critics were less convinced: Gary Raymond of Wales Arts Review called mocking an autistic teenage activist punching down and "probably bullying," and found the Priti Patel dominatrix sketch lazy and potentially misogynistic. Nesrine Malik, writing in The Guardian, judged the puppets technically masterful but the satire toothless, with jokes that seemed written by committee. Alex Moreland went further, calling the show lazy, self-satisfied, and hollow, accusing it of an "empty court jester role" whose biggest charge against its targets was mere hypocrisy. Defenders, like Mark Lawson in The Guardian, countered that the revival had lost none of the original's savagery or willingness to shock.

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The 2020 series is itself a revival of Spitting Image, the ITV satire that ran from 1984 to 1996, peaked at around 15 million viewers, won two BAFTAs from nine nominations and International Emmys in 1985 and 1986, and was axed due to declining audiences. Alongside the revival, BritBox added a compilation of the original series' 14 best episodes plus seasons 1 through 10, making the new show a gateway to the archive. The US Election Special was also released free on YouTube to American audiences on October 30, 2020.

Commissioning and production

BritBox, the subscription service created by ITV and the BBC, announced the revival on 4 March 2020 as its first original commission, with a first series in autumn 2020 and a second to follow in 2021.¹ Roger Law, co-creator of the original show with Peter Fluck, returned to lead the creative team and promised a program "more outrageous, audacious and salacious than the previous incarnation."¹ ITV's director of television Kevin Lygo framed the commission as a subscriber draw for the service.¹

Production during the pandemic. The series was produced by Avalon throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 100 puppets built by socially distanced teams of artists before launch. The roster ranged from world leaders such as Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping, through British figures including Matt Hancock, Priti Patel, and Rishi Sunak, to entertainers such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, RuPaul, and James Corden, alongside a puppet of the coronavirus itself.⁴ The writing team mixed British satirists such as Al Murray, Phil Wang, and Richard Herring with writers from American animation including Bill Odenkirk, David X. Cohen, and Patric Verrone, and the voice cast included Billy West, John DiMaggio, Debra Wilson, Jess Robinson, and Matt Forde, who also wrote for the show and voiced Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.⁴^•³ Scripts were written and new puppets made as close to each episode as possible, keeping the show topical.⁴

Broadcast and reception

The first episode went out on BritBox on 3 October 2020. Early reviews divided sharply: Chortle reported that they fell into two-star and four-star camps, with right-leaning papers most critical. Jan Moir of the Daily Mail praised the puppets as "marvels of boneless spite" but objected that the show attacked the Conservatives far more than Labour, while Anita Singh of The Daily Telegraph found the jokes often weak.⁶ The Guardian's review called the revival a welcome return that had "lost none of its savagery or willingness to shock," noting sketches such as a Trump whose anus composed his tweets and a Dominic Cummings depicted as an alien.⁷ Reviewers repeatedly returned to the same distinction: the puppets were widely admired while the writing drew criticism, a pattern Sean O'Grady of The Independent argued had also held for the original run.⁸

On aggregate, Season 1 held a 44% Tomatometer score from 9 critics and a 30% Popcornmeter audience score from fewer than 50 ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.⁹ The second series began in September 2021, and a Christmas special followed on 2 December 2021.²

ITV specials. Although the series was a BritBox exclusive, three specials were screened on ITV. In overnight figures the 2020 Halloween special drew 3.2 million viewers, the 2021 Halloween edition 1.97 million, and the 2021 Christmas special 2.02 million; with later viewings, since the episodes were not on standard catch-up services, their reach rose to 4.4 million, 2.67 million, and 2.7 million respectively.³ Avalon reported that the ITV election special reached a consolidated 4.5 million viewers and that the show accumulated over 150 million views on social media worldwide.⁵

Cancellation

In October 2022 Matt Forde confirmed that the show would not return for a third series. BritBox boss Reemah Sakaan had described the puppet satire as "incredibly expensive" to make, and reports suggested each individual puppet cost around £10,000 to produce. A BritBox spokesperson said the service would not air additional original commissions ahead of the launch of ITVX, and that a commission for ITV itself had not been confirmed. Forde argued the show should have run on a mainstream channel, saying it drew "crazy numbers" when the specials aired on ITV.³

International versions

Avalon's distribution materials describe a German production with Sky Deutschland that mixed globally resonating English-language content with new topical local sketches written by German comedy writers and filmed at the UK-based Spitting Image Studios.⁵ A planned US screening fell through before launch: according to The Times, reported by Creative Review, NBC pulled out of screening the program in the United States for fear of offending "powerful people."¹⁰

Context within the franchise

The revival arrived 24 years after the original series ended in 1996, and its commissioning followed years of speculation about a return.¹^•¹¹ The original show, at its 1980s peak watched by as many as 15 million viewers a week, was the benchmark against which the revival was judged, and several critics argued that memories of it were rose-tinted.¹⁰^•⁶ Academic commentary on the revival noted that its sketch format invited comparison with social media satire, which could be produced more quickly and cheaply than television comedy, and that the show underperformed as BritBox content, contributing to the streamer's venture losses and the eventual cessation of new original commissions.¹²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026