Still Spitting at Sixty

The Puppet Master is back with the inside story.

Written by one half of the Fluck and Law partnership, which produced Spitting Image for many years, this book will catch up with creative spirit Roger Law to investigate life at sixty through the eyes of the puppet master.

Roger Law, the evil genius behind the mocking, caricature puppets of Spitting Image – which lampooned Margaret Thatcher, ridiculed the Royal Family and gave birth to 'The Chicken Song' – unburdens his tormented soul and tells the awful truth of how it all came about.

The award-winning series ran for eight years, with Law masterminding the corruption and undermining of an entire generation's respect for authority and institutions, and giving voice to such comedic reprobates as Harry Enfield, Pamela Stephenson and Rory Bremner. He subjected the British public to political outrages – to a reception of delight and indignation in equal measure – every Sunday evening from 1984 to 1992.

When the satire bubble finally burst, Law found himself too young for retirement, too old to be retrained and without any discernable talent for domesticity or addressing a golf ball. In short, very thoroughly rinsed up.

Confronted with 'one day off after another as far as the eye can see,' Law did what some people thought was the only decent thing he could do, possibly had ever done – he transported himself to Australia.

STILL SPITTING AT SIXTY is Roger Law's account of his life in retirement down-under, filled with all the lunacy and flare that one would expect from the co-producer and creator of Spitting Image.

Reviews

'This entertaining memoir takes the reader behind the scenes at Spitting Image and on to a series of hilarious adventures as a "teenage granddad" in the Outback of Australia.’
Sunday Express

' … many glorious illustrations … litter this book … [it] is worth buying just for the twin studies of kangaroos. Not that it isn't a marvellous read. Still Spitting at Sixty is that rare thing, a ghostwritten book that somehow distils its "writer's" essential flavour … Hazlitt said we applaud satirists not out of love but fear. Impossible, though, to read this book and not love its author. Partly this is because it is so pungently amusing, partly because it is so unsickeningly life-affirming.'
Sunday Times, Christopher Bray

'… highly engaging … a breeze, a pleasure to read, as it leaps from anecdote to anecdote with aplomb and much humour. Like all the best people, Law is a dedicated fan of P.G.Wodehouse, and there are some lovely jokes here, if not the awesomely polished prose of his hero. This is a much more distinctive piece of work than the usual run of showbiz memoirs. And yet there is clearly something going on underneath … great entertainment, and his paintings, which somehow manage to be both bold and delicate, are quite something.'
Daily Mail, Marcus Berkmann