Gary Barlow

Where did it all go wrong? Of course, Spitting Image profited hugely from being the product of the Thatcher era, when the political battle lines were starkly drawn and the whiff of anarchy and grapeshot was in the air. Now we've entered an insipid (yet disturbing) era in which politicians posture, bluster and say anything that might nudge the all-powerful opinion polls half a percentage point in their direction. Conviction is dead, and everybody has fired off their personal opinions all over Twitter before the Newzoid scriptwriters have managed to pull the caps off their biros. And besides, doesn't the EU make all the big decisions for us anyway?

Take out the ads and Newzoids only last about 23 minutes, but even so it could hardly drag itself to the finishing tape. The team had laboured hard to draw up a checklist of likely targets, but then couldn't think of anything satirical to say about them. Ed Miliband appeared as a gormless geek with Ant and Dec (or perhaps it was vice versa). A barely-recognisable David Cameron was carried around like Nero in a sedan chair, talking like Ken Clarke impersonating the Duke of Kent. And why have him saying "get me to a hospital, a private one obvs" when his use of the NHS is well documented?

There was a sketch called "Mrs Crown's Boys", in which the Queen and Prince Philip kept saying "feck", and we had a pantomimic Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond singing "sod the English". It looked as if there might be a daring moment coming up when we saw a Muslim couple worrying about their son joining Isis, but it stopped before anything controversial happened. Nigel Farage was depicted as a stand-up comic with a fag and a pint of beer. Then Gary Barlow sang a song about not paying tax. It was like Anti-Pointless, where you had to find the laziest, most obvious answers that everyone else had already thought of.