Satire offensive

If Headcases isn't cruel, it won't work states Matthew Parris. It's got to hurt. If it doesn't bite it doesn't work. And if it doesn't shock, it won't stick.

To know why that is true of political satire you would have to be more than one of The Times's parliamentary sketchwriters, as for 13 years was Parris; you would have to be a psychoanalyst or priest. What we know is that for at least the past four centuries England and Ireland have excelled at the art of political lampoonery, and almost everything that survives from it is savage. An art that started with cartooning and satirical fiction, and moved to poetry and theatre, and finally to broadcasting too, has altered the media through which it has been published, but stayed astonishingly true to the tradition of rude, crude, unfair, needling and unbelievably personal attack that has always distinguished English satire. Continental satirists and cartoonists usually go for the issue first, the individual second: with us it is the other way round.

And the legacy is truly shocking. Jonathan Swift published a modest proposal that the Irish should eat their own babies, as an answer to famine in that country: it was meant as a satire on the heartlessness of the English. In the 18th century it was not thought unusual to caricature monarchs sitting on the lavatory. Such are the traditions that were handed down to the BBC's That Was The Week That Was in 1960s Britain - and 20 years later to Spitting Image. Like it or not, Headcases will be called the successor to Spitting Image and compared with ITV's crude, ferocious and long-running end-of-20th-century satire. Computer animation may have replaced the famous rubber puppets that the programme's victims gave silly sums of money to purchase, Gordon Brown and David Cameron may have replaced the pinstriped Margaret Thatcher, Dracula Norman Tebbit and clownish Neil Kinnock, but the spirit of British political caricature - part savage and part infantile - remains the same across the ages.

Maybe we should define terms. Or maybe it isn't worth trying. I've already made free use of words such as caricature, cartoon, satire, lampoonery (and you could throw in parody too) as though they were loosely interchangeable. In fact, there are two distinct strands to this branch of humour. The first strand is the oldest and most primitive insult in human history: mimicry. We mock by making a copy of our victim, and we mock further by making the copy grotesque: an exaggeration. The medium is secondary: it could be audio or visual; still or animated; film, theatre, newspaper or book. It can be a copycat voice (like Rory Bremner's), a copycat walk; it can be a savage cartoon, or a puppet, or an actor on stage, or a whole novel such as George Orwell's Animal Farm, where the animals were really grotesque versions of real people on the Left and Right. What all these have in common, however, is that part of the pleasure and laughter comes from seeing dignified people made undignified through the depiction of crude copies of them.

That itself is the joke: the first joke. It is the core joke for England's greatest cartoonists. Look at our 18th-century cartoonists like James Gillray and William Hogarth, whose demolition of Georges III and IV the former Cabinet Minister Kenneth Baker (himself portrayed on Spitting Image as a slug) has recently showcased in two new collections. Or look at fine modern exemplars of the tradition like The Times's own Peter Brookes.

But look harder at a Brookes cartoon, a Spitting Image puppet or a Headcases animation and, though you may laugh first at the rude copy of an important personage, you may well be entertained next by an implied disrespectful commentary on something in the news that the personage has said or done. This - disrespectful commentary on current events - is the second strand. Satirist, parodist, cartoonist or lampooner alike, will often be protesting at, not just laughing at, their victims.

Pariss' own experience, as an MP and then as a journalist leaves him ambivalent about the power of satire to change things. Unless a satirist - in print, picture or TV image - goes with the grain of how the public are already beginning to see a political leader, his work is wasted; but what he can do is echo and amplify - and, with humour, give wings to - ideas that are already current.

Parris would be more confident of satire's power to hurt (as opposed to embarrass) if he hadn't seen for myself how much most of our political and media class crave the attention, however cruel, of satirists. When Spitting Image decided not to replace their famous puppet of Brian Walden with a puppet of his successor [Parris] on Weekend World he felt desolate. Partly because we all like public attention, even when hostile. Partly because to be among the puppet cast of that series was for many years the mark of having arrived. Norman Tebbit played up to his bloodsucking puppet. Margaret Thatcher pretended not to see the joke about her - but did, and finally began to parody herself. Believe me, if Headcases takes off as its predecessor did, they'll all want to be on it.

And before the “not a patch on Spitting Image” comparisons begin, it's important for those of us who were actually there in 1984, when Spitting Image started, to remind ourselves that the series wasn't usually all that funny. The satire was a hit-and-miss affair, with more misses than hits. We tend to remember only the hits. We remember Thatcher's poll-tax map of Great Britain on which Scotland was “the Testing Ground”; the joint leaders of the newly formed Liberal and SDP Alliance - a big David Owen puppet with a tiny, squeaky David Steel in his pocket like a kangaroo's joey; Roy Hattersley spraying spittle whenever he spoke; and a grey John Major forever pushing peas around his plate.

But those are only four sketches. Readers with long memories may perhaps be able to remember a handful more. Spitting Image, however, ran for 12 years. Many of the sketches were mildly funny, just a few were side-splitting, and frankly much of the rest was low-grade slapstick, with puppets for ever biffing each other on the heads in routine and unfunny Punch & Judy fashion. People and programmes, however, live on in their moments of genius. Spitting Image had enough of these to deserve its place as a classic.

Technically it was fairly crude, though some (not all) of the puppets were inspired, and some of the politicians (like Thatcher) grew eventually to resemble their puppets. It was not without wit: Thatcher, dining with her Cabinet and ordering steak, and in response to the waiter's “And the vegetables?” replying, “They'll have the same as me”; but the series was distinguished more often by sheer brutality (the sketch of Thatcher consulting Adolf Hitler, working incognito as an elderly gardener next-door, must have given its editors an anxious moment) or downright cruelty (Norma Major told Parris that she and her husband had loved Spitting Image until that peas sketch, after which she couldn't bear to watch it: “John doesn't even particularly like peas,” she added, sadly.) Headcases will need to get in place a cast of computer-generated representations that are, as often as not, technically memorable. It will need a measure of wit and the occasional flash of insight. And it will need to find - or create - an audience keen to enter its world and knowing and caring enough about its cast of characters for the jokes to mean much.

It will also need occasionally to shock. Really shock. There must be lightning flashes of cruelty, and they must often border on and sometimes trespass into bad taste. Unless there occur episodes which seriously offend a minority of viewers and bring the series regularly to the attention of the broadcasting watchdogs, it's never going to take off. Parris does mean to offend. Not just the easy targets, Christians, pensioners, the BNP, monarchists and toffs - it's perfectly safe and PC to attack these - but people on the more sensitive outposts of the diversity agenda. The best traditions of English satire should not spare Muslims, blacks, gays, women, the disabled or the mentally ill. There will have to be sketches that make people wince, as Parris winces when he sees David Blunkett's blindness parodied. Spitting Image, which after one Tory election victory had the massed puppetry of the entire Tory Cabinet singing the Nazi Tomorrow Belongs To Me, would not in today's politics have hesitated to depict Messrs Brown and Cameron in a gruesome bidding competition as to the respective disabilities of their two sons. Do broadcasters still have the stomach for that kind of thing? Every age has its own political correctness. Less prudish about nudity, swearing, sex and violence than we used to be, have we simply replaced the old taboos with new ones such as racism, sexism, homophobia - and smoking?

Where the Victorians covered piano legs lest the piano appeared to show ankle, Mr Blair's New Britain bans snapshots of school Nativity plays lest they offer illicit thrills to paedophiles. My guess is that the underlying Britain changes less, but the print and broadcast media are becoming nervous about representing it. Brave satire should go clodhopping into this anxious balance. Parris watched a sampler DVD of Headcases. He said the series evidently intends to adopt the same strategy as did Spitting Image in its later years: a sort of BBC Radio 5 Live fusion of politics, news, celebrity and sport. Thus, besides politics, we have satire on the Beckhams, the grandes dames of British cinema, and trash-celebrity; but I will need convincing that the audience for all this will have much patience for politics, or vice versa. Some of the computer animation was brilliant, and many of the caricatures spot-on, but in a medium where the competition grows ever more varied, from Shrek to on-board airline safety videos, this novelty is likely to wear off.

And so to the really awkward question. Was it cruel enough, pointed enough? Were there aching moments or unforgettable lines? What Parris saw gave reason for hope but not yet for confidence. In his own field, politics, he found Headcases slightly safe. If you want to do a brutal satire of the Prime Minister, but shrink from the image of a one-eyed, paranoid, nail-biting obsessive, you've flunked the test. Nick Clegg should have been in a nappy, having accidents, and dipping rusks into milk. And though Headcases' William Hague was splendid, I'm at a loss to know how you'd do David Cameron. Depicting him a bit of a toff is nowhere near cruel enough, though George Osborne showed promise as Cameron's snivelling school fag.

David Davies should be a broken-nosed thug, Dr Liam Fox a body-snatching creep, and the other Tories a faceless bunch whose names their leader keeps forgetting. Vince Cable would be a foxtrotting poisoner; David Miliband a monkey with embarrassing habits; Ed Balls a nasty playground bully; Alan Johnson a cockney spiv; and Harriet Harman and Dawn Primarolo operated by machines.

Parris concludes by telling us what he really thinks; namely, that Armando Iannucci's The Thick of It leads the way. Now that the British family no longer sit down together to sample the evening's TV viewing and talk about it over breakfast, you probably can't corral different audiences into a single, mainstream satirical show. After what should prove a promising start, I would take Headcases into more dangerous territory: a niche programme, unafraid to offend, and placing politics and real news at its centre. Where's the fun in mocking Amy Winehouse? Leave the Peters Andre and Doherty to parody themselves. Produce political satire that, though its audience is circumscribed, is watched with both anxiety and relish by people who count, and from time to time brings a Commons morning when David Cameron or Gordon Brown find it hard to look their own backbenchers in the eye.

National lampoons: 2,500 years of great satirists

Aristophanes (456-386BC) One of the first political satirists. Wrote Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens withhold sex from their military and political husbands.

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Author of Gulliver's Travels and former priest. Drapier's Letters, written anonymously, were so successful in their criticism of an Irish coin-making monopoly that the Government offered a reward for the name of the author. No one responded.

William Hogarth (1697-1764) The pictorial satirist. His Beer Street engraving shows Londoners enjoying vast quantities of beer after a ban on the unlimited sale of gin.

Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1857) One of the 18th century's most popular cartoonists. His Early Lesson in Marching shows four men in civilian dress posing while being instructed by an officer on how to march.

James Gillray (1757-1815) Fan of Hogarth. His The Coalition shows Lord North and Charles James Fox excreting into a pan bearing the royal coat of arms while the Devil stirs the contents.

Punch (1841-1992 and 1996-2002) Its sophisticated but inoffensive material made it a staple in 19th-century British drawing rooms. Closed because of poor sales, relaunched by Mohamed Al Fayed, closed again six years later.

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American journalist best known for his satirical reporting of the trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution.

Mort Sahl (1927- ) An American stand-up comedian who once wrote speeches for JFK. His trademark was appearing on stage with a newspaper in hand, and many of his jokes stemmed from the day's headlines.

Gerald Scarfe (1936- ) Sunday Times cartoonist also known for his work with The New Yorker and Yes, Minister and cover illustration of Pink Floyd's The Wall. His Top Bitch (below) shows Margaret Thatcher as a bitch, excreting Ted Heath as a turd .

Peter Brookes (1943- ) British Press Awards Cartoonist of the Year. Political illustrator and cartoonist for The Times since 1983. Since 1986, has also been co-cover artist of The Spectator. In That's All Folks (below) Tony Blair appears in the famous Looney Tunes cartoon sign-off with the bad taste of Iraq in his mouth.

Private Eye (1961- ) Thorn in the side of the Establishment, edited by Ian Hislop. Known for gossip about the misdeeds of the powerful and famous, and for the number of libel lawsuits brought against it.