This is the story of how vicious latex caricatures of government ministers and pop stars became must-see television, writes Dan Carrier

Still Spitting at Sixty by Roger Law with Lewis Chester
Harper Collins, £18.99

THE decapitated heads of the Prime Minister and the US President were driven up and down the M1 each week. They were frequently damaged in transit, leading to emergency surgery moments before filming began.
But such was the skill of the craftsmen behind Spitting Image, which spent 12 years poking fun at the great and the good, fans of the series would never have known Ronald Reagan’s nose had had to be re-built moments before he was filmed in bed with Nancy using rubber and wood glue. Made in a workshop in east London but filmed in Birmingham, the puppets made daily sojourns northwards to fit in with studio time.
Spitting Image was taken off the screens in 1996, to join the ranks of popular but defunct comedy shows like Fawlty Towers and Blackadder. And now the story of Roger Law, the creative genius behind the series, has been told by Hampstead based writer Lewis Chester. He is a close friend of Law’s and, when a book was on the cards, he was happy to come in as a ghost writer to, as he puts it, make Law’s rants intelligible.
Lewis Chester first met Roger Law at the Sunday Times in the 1960s. Roger was working as a magazine illustrator, while Lewis was on the investigative team that put together the award-winning Insight column.
Roger left the paper in the 1970s because he felt it had dumbed down, and turned his hand to model making.
He says: “People have their own idea when the rot set in. A popular date is 1983, when Andrew Neil arrived as editor. More popular still is 1981, when Rupert Murdoch took over… I would date my own whinge to late 1974, when advertising got their hooks into the magazine.”
Lewis lasted longer: he gave up the Murdoch shilling when News International shifted production from Fleet Street to Wapping.
He became one of the 40 journalists who backed striking print workers known as the Wapping Refuseniks.
He said: “I knew we wouldn’t stop new technology but I did not want to see the printers go without their redundancy payments.”
His stand cost him his job, so he turned his hands to books as well as working on other papers. He has written about the Zinoiev Letter scandal of the 1920s, and penned the life stories of photographer Don MacCullum and billionaires Howard Hughes and Aristotle Onassis. But biographies are not what he likes to write, and he says he does them mainly as favours to friends.
He says: “I don’t really like writing books, but when a mate suggests it, I feel inclined to do so.”
Law first approached him in 1985 to write about how Spitting Image was made, and in 1994 he wrote the text for a book illustrated by Law. So when Law decided he wanted to do an autobiography, Lewis was a natural choice.
On MacCullum and Law, Lewis says: “I liked both the people, and I knew they would need a hand pulling together the writing side.
“Both are articulate but neither are writers. I have had no problem getting stories out of them. They are both big talkers. I am just putting their thoughts into words, and deleting their many expletives.”
Lewis and Roger both come from working class backgrounds and have had similar careers in the media.
Roger’s father was a builder while Lewis’s was a dustman.
Lewis won a scholarship, aged 11, to go to the Essex public school Bancroft’s. When he left, did his National Service in the army where he became a PT instructor.
A keen cricketer, he still plays for a team called Lord Gnome – after the Private Eye proprietor – and used to play football each week for Hampstead Heath’s well-known casuals, Dartmouth Park United.
He shared the pitch with broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, Jim Callaghan’s speechwriter Bernard Donoghue and writer Hunter Davies, who both Roger and Lewis worked with at the Sunday Times.
He went to Oxford and it was here he became interested in journalism, writing for the university newspaper Charwell.
He cut his teeth at the Newcastle Journal and then moved to the Sunday Times, which was part of the same group. Now, aged 68, he wants to concentrate on biographies of people he admires – he is penning the story of anti-apartheid campaigner Revd Michael Scott, which will be out later this year.
But Roger’s story presented Lewis with a problem – his subject had moved to Australia.
When Spitting Image finished, Law was at a loose end and decided to see what the southern hemisphere had to offer, and, as he put it, to get as far away from puppet making as possible.
Instead, he returned to drawing, painting and pottery – and pouring his life story out over the telephone and email for Lewis to decipher and put into printable form.
“Ghost-writing with Roger is not difficult,” he admits.
“When I’d written a chapter I’d email it to him. It would go back and forward but we did not change too much. If we had something funny it would go in.”
And he was working with a man whose virulent sense of humour was formed at Cambridge School of Art, where he was friends with Peter Cook. He had cut his teeth working for Private Eye and drawing cartoons for the walls of The Establishment, Cook’s Soho club that attracted the readiest wits of the era.
Spitting Image became more than just a popular comedy show. In the 1980s, when the Labour Party was struggling to carve itself an identity, it became almost an unofficial opposition.
The puppets were not the only stars of the show: the writers and voices are a Who’s Who of British comedy. Harry Enfield, Steve Coogan, Rory Bremner and Alistair McGowan all lent their talents.
Lewis has managed to distil the off-the-wall humour that made Spitting Image such a success into what the dust jacket calls a ‘sort-of’ autobiography.
It tells the story of a man whose life work has been a marriage between art and humour, a genre that has its roots in William Hogarth’s works, Heath Robinson’s cartoons and more recently the likes of Gerald Scarfe.
“John Lloyd, the director, saw the show as safety valve, a way of letting off steam at the absurdities of the Thatcher years,” explains Lewis.
“And after awhile, the political aspect was not so important, it was just the fact it was really silly.
“Roger Law and Peter Fluck (the other originator of the show) became disappointed when it became less political. But when it started doing more sport – Steve ‘interesting’ Davis, for example, – and popular culture, it became more accessible and that’s why it lasted so long.”