The cast of Newzoids, which debuted on ITV last night
The handcart that the UK is in inches ever closer to hell; the man whose job it is to keep the shit as far away from the fan as possible is getting overrun. Britain today is a country where family homes are knocked down to be replaced by empty luxury flats; where pubs are bulldozed by developers who haven’t even bothered to get permission; where industry collapses and culture is tippexed out of existence by sex scandals and cover ups; where seemingly inhuman gas bags vie for our votes to keep them in lobster rolls – perfect conditions, you’d think, for the breeding of some real scathing, top quality satire. A mass grave of putrescent politicians and celebrities is fuming, stinking, waiting to be dug up – but who will man the spades? Step forward ITV’s Newzoids, the new puppet-based impression show that has been hailed as the spiritual successor to Spitting Image.
Newzoids hit our screens last night and, as much as some TV writers may try to convince you otherwise, it was absolutely untenable. It was lazily, beguilingly shit, each gag so obvious you’d already written the punchline in your head before it was delivered.
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Watching it, I was reminded of ITV’s other bizarre take on the post- Spitting Image impression showreel, the animated 2DTV. The comparison is not a difficult one to make: both aired on the same channel, neither were great, and both had Jon Culshaw doing strange variations of his own voice to sound like other people, but always still sounding very off-puttingly like himself. But while 2DTV at least attempted to scrape together some vaguely original jokes (Bill Gates’ Windows 2000–generated house crashing and vanishing must have been decent enough if I still just about remember it) Newzoids made no such effort. Russell Brand complained about austerity like a 19th century art teacher then jumped in a limo. He’s rich but he complains about poverty. That was the joke. Obama made a black-people-getting-shot-while-running-away gag, which didn’t work and tasted weird in the mouth. And speaking of weird mouths, the puppets in the show had very odd CGI ones; animated so that their movements didn’t fully match up with the words that were coming out. It wasn’t quite as awful as imagining the Dolmio puppets smashing steaming hot passata and mince into their broom-hair moustaches and entranceless felt maws but nevertheless it grated.
Some of the characters in Newzoids also seemed to be copy and pasted from its ‘toon predecessor, which last aired in December 2004. Eric Pickles was a fat northern commoner, just like John Prescott. Andy Murray was a boring, bottling tennis player, just like Tim Henman. Why are they not trying?
This seems to be the eternal question when watching things on TV that objectively just aren’t funny. Why doesn’t this work? Why is this so bad? How was this allowed to be made? What collective madness caused the tens of people this thing had to go through to persevere with it? The adverts played and there was one for Weedol. It featured a man dementedly saying he could use Weedol and kill plants while doing an assortment of other things. He was always killing. It was funnier than anything that happened in Newzoids. When your brand new comedy show is upstaged by an advert for weed killer, you know something has gone drastically wrong.
There were also a strange number of music numbers in this show. Music-based gags are hard to pull off, so let’s face it: Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond singing a political cover of The Proclaimers’ “500 Miles”, replete with voting stats, was never going to split any sides. Then, towards the end, we got Nigel Farage doing stand up in a club, starting jokes with tired, old setups (literally, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”), followed by him blurting out xenophobic tropes as punchlines. It was so easy, so basic that it could not have been anything other than the first thought that entered anyone’s mind.
Most of today’s reviews make the point that Spitting Image also suffered from a poor first episode, which may be true. But your first episode is your opening gambit, it’s what makes people decide whether to press “series link” on their Sky remotes. This isn’t Game of Thrones; it’s not going to “take a while to get going”, it’s a rubbish pseudo-satire show with skits that last less than one minute.
If this is all we can muster at a time like this, it’s time to do away with impression shows. It’s not that the appetite for impressions isn’t there – in the last couple of days, a video of a guy impersonating Robin Williams has been busy going so viral you’re nan’s probably crying to it right now. It’s that, given three minutes, your average Twitter user can do satire with the same level of bite and wit as Newzoids displayed last night. And it’s also that life in Britain right now may be beyond satire – want to see a crude puppet with an unconvincing cadence parading around on your TV screens? Just watch the Lib Dem party election broadcast! See? Satire is easy.
