The Spitting Image reboot has been panned by one of its stars.
Steve Nallon – who voiced Mrs Thatcher in both the original and new version – says it has lost the laughs.
He said: “In the new version, the puppets were great and the voices are great.
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“I laughed at some stuff. But the sketches just went on and on. I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got the joke now, move on to the next sketch’. But they just kept it going. They were too long.”
Steve, 61, thinks the new series suffers because it doesn’t have original producer John Lloyd.
He said: “John used to get the script and cut it and cut it. Economy is key. He knew how to make scripts brilliant.”
Steve has a new novel, The Time That Never Was, available at luath.co.uk.
Spitting Image originally ran on ITV from 1984 to 1996, with as many as 15million tuning in to watch when it was at is peak.
But it was cancelled after viewing figures fell.
There had been plans to bring it back in 2006, but they were scrapped after a dispute over some puppets of Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly which were created.
More than 10 years later, in 2019, creator Roger Law announced that it would be returning for a new series.
This time, it debuted on streaming service BritBox in 2020, featuring caricature puppets of the likes of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
It has so far had two series, with a whole host of Boris Johnson's former colleagues included – such as Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, Dominic Cummings and Rishi Sunak.
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