The Conservative leadership was a constant target. Margaret Thatcher's puppet was a needle-nosed Rea­ gan groupie who consulted with Hitler on immigration policy and sold off England's infrastructure to buying packs of yuppies; her eventual successor, John Major, was portrayed as a dull, totally gray man who ate nothing but peas. The opposition Labour leaders, including Neil Kinnock as "Kinnochio," were pilloried for their inability to challenge decades of Tory rule.

     In spite of its detractors, more than 12 million viewers (a quarter of England's adult population) watched Spitting Image on Central Independent Television, a subsidiary of ITV. The program's spin-off records, books, comics, and videos sold in the millions. It won an International Emmy for "Outstanding Popular Arts" program in the 1985-86 season, and a franchised edition appeared on Moscow television.

     Spitting Image originated with Peter Fluck and Roger Law, who first met at Cambridge School of Art. They became involved in the liberal politics favored by art students,  through which they met another student, Peter Cook. In 1961 , Cook fronted England's flowering of political satire by starting with Dudley Moore in the revue "Beyond the Fringe," which inspired the TV program That Was the Week That Was. Cook employed Law as an illustrator for his projects, such as the satire magazine Private Eye and a political comic strip in the Observer newspaper. Fluck and Law built separate careers in  magazine  illustration,  and Law took two commissions in the music business that yielded classic album covers: The Jimi Hendrix Experience as Hindu deities for Aris: Bold As Love and Tire Who Sell Out, for which Roger Daltrey  posed silting in a bathtub filled with baked beans.

     Fluck and Law each began working with sculpted caricatures, creating several images that appeared in London's Sunday Times Magazine, where Law had become an artistic director and reporter. In 1975 they formed a partnership, named Luck and Flaw, to turn out their three-dimensional portraits for such outlets as the New York Times Magazine, Germany's Stern, international editions of Time, and National Lampoon. The work proved barely profitable until 1981, when Martin Lambie - Nairn invited them to lunch.

     Lambie-Nairn was a graphic designer at London Weekend Television. He thought that a political television program using puppets or animation might be a good investment, and he proposed to front Fluck  and Law the capital for a pilot  episode  (thus  the credit  at the end of each episode, "From an original lunch by Martin Lambie - Nairn."). The pilot took two years to complete.

     The pair quickly decided that the show should use puppets, which, like Jim Henson's Muppets,  required two operators, for the face and one arm. (Henson,  in fact, turned down an offer to collaborate on the puppet workshop.) The first puppet designs  were  bogged down by expense,  heavy electronics needed just to make their eyes move. After  several months  without any film being shot, Fluck cobbled together a simple mechanism using steel cable and air bulbs. The  team also picked up Tony Hendra of  National  Lampoon (and later of Spinal Tap) as a writer and hired two producers: Jon Blair, a producer of current affairs programming, and John Lloyd of the Not the  Nine O'Clock News. Spitting!, the pilot's title. exhausted the resources of several backers, including computer executive Clive Sinclair, before it was completed at a cost of £150,000, a record for a light­ entertainment program.

     In its first season, Spitting Image focused exclusively on politics and played to mediocre ratings. For the next round, Fluck and Law were obliged to carica­ture entertainment and sports figures as well, and the show's fortunes immediately improved. The partners worked out a schedule in which they spent the offseason stockpiling non topical segments, such as music-video parodies (in one, Barry Manilow was all nose; another showed off Madonna's singing belly button). Each episode had a window of six minutes for fresh political commentary, written and taped the night before its broadcast.

     The Spitting Image parodies reached a status not un­like that of Mad magazine in the early 1960s, as many of those whom the show caricatured took their skewer­ing as a sign that they had "made it." While Thatcher has only commented, "I don't ever watch that program," members of the House of Commons had tapes of each show delivered to them the following Monday, and former Tory Defense Minister Michael Heseltine tried to purchase his puppet.

     The commercial broadcaster Central Television gave Spitting Image few censorship problems. BBC radio, however, refused to play their first spin-off record, with a Prince Andrew imitator boasting, 'Im Just a Prince Who Can't Say No." "The Chicken Song," however, a single that parodied the sing-along ditties that infest pub jukeboxes and vacation discotheques every summer, reached number one on the charts.

     The influence of U.S. politics on the British scene was apparent in frequent lampoons of Ronald Reagan. American news outlets excerpted a video with Ron and Nancy as "Leaders of the Pack," singing "Do Do Ron Ron." The befuddled Reagan also appeared in a serial thriller, "The President's Brain Is Missing," and was featured prominently in the Spitting Image-produced video for Genesis's song "Land of Confusion." In September 1986, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) aired a two-part original Spitting Image special in which the secret arbiters of fame, including Bill Cosby and Ed McMahon, hatch a clandestine plot to have an over muscled Sylvester Stallone elected president.

     Spitting Image projects continued to appear on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1990s, and in 2000 many puppets from the program were auctioned off for charity. Numerous videos and musical recordings are available in Britain, where repeats of the program are shown on cable. American VCRs can play a compilation of Spitting Image music videos, a puppet production of "Peter and the Wolf," and a mock documentary, "Bumbledown: The Life and Times of Ronald Reagan" (a double feature with the musical, "The Sound of Maggie!"). The group also collaborated with U.S. cable channel Comedy Central to illustrate a book by Glenn Eichler, Bill and Hillary's 12-Step Recovery Guide. The book was promoted through a series of commercial cutaways on the cable channel, featuring the puppet Clinton family.