Spitting Image: Nick George - The Man Who Gave Us Nouvelle Cuisine Du DHSS

It's always a pleasure to get e-mails up here at '80s Actual Towers. We don't get many, but we treasure those we do get.

Recently, we had a corker from Nick George, regarding our post on Spitting Image, must-watch TV for us in the mid-to-late 1980s (let's face it, its "more peas, dear?" subject matter in the 1990s didn't really have the same appeal).

Nick wrote:

Hi,

Way back in 1984 I was working as a very junior art director at an ad agency in London. I did an ad for Lego, it was photographed by a guy who had worked with Fluck and Law.

The photographer and I got on well. He introduced me to John Lloyd, the Spitting Image producer.

They were putting a book together.

I contributed a bunch of ideas, one of them got into the book though I didn't write the text I did title it:

Nouvelle Cuisine Du DHSS.

Over thirty years later it was pleasing to find a scan of that page on your blog. So, thanks, I don't have that book any more.

Trivia: the photographer also shot the model of Prince Andrew for the Spitting Image book.

The pic, attached, caused the book publishers, Faber and Faber, to lose their royal warrant.

London, eh.

Best regards,

Nick

And here we have it - Prince Andrew, in all his latex glory! '80s humour still floats my boat, although many "sensitive" 21st Century souls I know flinch at it. But then they also have an attack of the vapours and write outraged letters on Digital Spy if somebody so much as drags on an e-cigarette in their vicinity (whilst quite happily gumming up the atmosphere by undertaking walking or bussing distance "jaunts" in their broom brooms).

It's our considered opinion that the prissy 21st Century needs to do a bit of manning and womaning up.

The shape of things (then) to come - 31st December, 1983 - a preview of Spitting Image. And isn't that Mr President (gasp!). God bless America!

Anyway, back to subject. We wrote to Nick George to ask if he'd mind us publishing his email, and received a reply containing another goodie - the Lego Arthur Scargill pic at the bottom of this post.

Many thanks to Nick. His second e-mail, which also contains a link to a Spitting Image site, is included below.

Hello Andrew, glad you appreciated my memories. Please, publish the contents of my mail to you, I have no problem with that.

The photographer was John Lawrence-Jones. He had shot a Lego trade ad for me. Attached here, it shows Arthur Scargill, at the height of the contentious miners strike.

More background on Spitting Image here: http://www.we-heart.com/2014/03/31/spitting-image-from-start-to-finish/ 

Includes the infamous Randy Andy pic.

John also shot the Luck and Flaw Treasure Island book, a couple of years prior.

Really like your site. keep at it.

all best

cheers now.

Nick

Thanks again to Nick.

MAGGIE! MAGGIE! MAGGIE! OUT! OUT! OUT!

An oft heard cry.

"Hold A Chicken In The Air, Stick A Deckchair Up Your Nose..."

"NEW! Non Compact Mono Recording". The 12 Hour Version - featuring the Wet Gits! The Chicken Song from Spitting Image was a scathing spoof of several chart records of (then) recent years (anybody for Agadoo?).

The Chicken Song was a 1986 No 1 - deservedly. All together now...

It's the time of year
Now that spring is in the air
When those two wet gits
With the girly curly hair
Make another song for moronic holidays
That nauseate-ate-ate-ates
In a million different ways
From the shores of Spain
To the coast of southern France
No matter where you hide
You just can't escape this dance...

Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Buy a jumbo jet
And then bury all your clothes
Paint your left knee green
Then extract your wisdom teeth
Form a string quartet
And pretend your name is Keith

Skin yourself alive
Learn to speak Arapahoe
Climb inside a dog
And behead an Eskimo
Eat a Renault Four
Wear salami in your ears
Casserole your gran
Disembowel yourself with spears

The disco is vibrating
The sound is loud and grating
It's truly nauseating
Let's do the dance again...

Hold a chicken in the air
Stick a deckchair up your nose
Yes you'll hear this song
In the holiday discos
And there's no escape
In the clubs or in the bars
You would hear this song
If you holidayed in Mars

Skin yourself alive
Learn to speak Arapahoe
Climb inside a dog
And behead an Eskimo
Now you've heard it once
Your brain will spring a leak
And tho' you hate this song
You'll be humming it for weeks...

Another goody from the 1986 charts - it's our old mates Chas n' Dave n' the Matchroom Mob...

Snooker loopy nuts are we, me and him and them and me, we'll show you what we can do with a load of balls and a snooker cue...

Here's Su Pollard, good old Peggy from Hi-De-Hi!, charting in February 1986 with Starting Together, the theme to the BBC's documentary (I don't recall us using the term "docusoap" back then) The Marriage.

Nick Kamen strode into a launderette, got his kecks off, and set hearts fluttering. Then he hit the pop charts...

"Wow!!" went just about all the nation's girlies. And a lot of the fellas too, I shouldn't wonder.

"Break my heart, don't break my heart, break my heart, don't break my heart..."

Nick aided men's health no end: for years, medical types had been warning us geezers that our increasingly skimpy briefs did our fertility no good at all. We had not absorbed the message by the early 1980s (see here). But Nick's wearing of those staggeringly wonderful, brilliantly roomy, startingly attractive boxer shorts in the jeans ads helped to propel that style of male knickers to the centre of the style universe. Or somewhere near it. In the late 1980s, boxers were increasingly being seen as a very lovely thing indeed. Even Sinitta liked her toyboy to wear them. See here for more.

Personally, I wouldn't be seen dead in 'em. I'll never be a style icon.

The Land of Confusion

The Land of Confusion by Genesis. And here is Genesis. Or is it? The guys in the picture are the Spitting Image of the boys in the band.

Yoiks - it's Mrs T!!

Watched by President Reagan and a dinosaur, Mr Spock of Star Trek fame takes a screwdriver to his Rubik's Cube...

But even the cool-headed Vulcan loses it with the Rubik's Cube; he punches it and throws it over his shoulder.

Bedtime for Bonzo. And Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

The President wants a drink of water, and presses the bedside call button for his nurse. Or does he?!

"That was some nurse!"