The way all politicians want to be remembered.

It’s 30 years since the first broadcast of Spitting Image, the greatest satirical TV programme ever made and there’s a documentary to celebrate this on BBC Four tomorrow night. I was talking to John Lloyd, who produced Spitting Image and mentioned the old maxim of politics being “Show business for ugly people”. He said that, on the show, they could call politicians useless, dishonest or unprincipled and it was just water off a duck’s back, goes with the territory. But draw attention to any physical imperfection and they hated it. They just wanted to be good-looking. But then, don’t we all?. Isn’t this the compliment that outranks all others? Very few politicians are big and handsome. But quite a lot are simply bad.