Had Steve Nallon made the sensible choice, he would have spent weeks up in north Wales playing the back end of a horse, he tells MailOnline.
But, true to form as a defiant working class lad from Leeds, he instead opted to remain unemployed in the hope of finding a more exciting acting role.
Luckily for him, just a few weeks later he landed the gig of his life: voicing Margaret Thatcher on Spitting Image for a decade.
The biting satirical show – which was defined by its use of grotesque latex puppets of politicians, the Royal Family and celebrities – made its TV debut 40 years ago this month, on February 26, 1984.
Speaking from his home Barnet, north London, Steve brings the voice of Britain’s first female prime minister back to life with uncanny precision.
‘We all read it. Denis and I read it on a Sunday,’ Steve – impersonating ‘Maggie’ – says of the ‘excellent’ Daily Mail.
The comedian admits that, due to the way Mrs Thatcher was portrayed – as a power-crazed authoritarian who had her Cabinet under her heel – Spitting Image’s creators mistakenly enhanced her reputation.
As for the remake of the show, which was cancelled after just two seasons in 2022 after critics called it ‘toothless’ and ‘woke‘, it failed because its producers did not understand that the ‘whole point’ of it was to be ‘offensive’.
‘We live in a culture now where it’s very difficult to offend anybody, and there’s often very good reasons for that,’ Steve says.
‘But offending Jacob Rees-Mogg, Keir Starmer, Nigel Farage, whoever it is, that’s our job as satirists to do that.’
Spitting Image was, at times, scandalous. Almost no one in the public eye was spared from the fierce wit of its writers, who included comedian Steve Coogan and future Private Eye editor Ian Hislop.
Between 1984 and 1996, 15million people tuned in to see politicians, pop stars, sports personalities and religious figures ridiculed.
There was the womanising Pope John Paul II, a trigger-happy President Ronald Reagan and a gin-swigging Queen Mother.
As for her daughter the Queen, she was habitually portrayed with a headscarf and a CND badge.
Domineering Mrs Thatcher was made out to be a secret fascist who had clandestine conversations with Adolf Hitler, who was living under an assumed name at Number 9 Downing Street.
Her puppet wore a man’s suit and was depicted bossing around hapless ministers.
In one particularly famous sketch, she was seen ordering a steak while having dinner with her colleagues. ‘What about the vegetables?’ a waitress asks.
‘Oh, they’ll have the same as me,’ she replies, indicating the rest of the Cabinet.
Trade and Industry Minister Norman Tebbit – Mrs Thatcher’s loyal lieutenant – was depicted as a thug wearing a leather jacket.
Chancellor Geoffrey Howe talked to sheep, whilst Defence Secretary Michael Heseltine was put in a flak jacket.
It was this fearless but hilarious ridicule of the great and the good that saw it win ten BAFTAs and two Emmys.
Steve’s talents went beyond Mrs Thatcher. He also voiced the likes of Labour grandee Roy Hattersley, playwright Alan Bennett, national treasure naturalist David Attenborough and the Queen Mother (albeit with a ridiculous Black Country accent).
‘The biggest difference I think that Spitting Image made over its 16 years is deference,’ Steve says.
‘There was so much deference to politicians, deference to the police, deference definitely to the Royal Family.
‘And the portrayal of the Royal Family by Spitting Image helped to bring about a less deferential society in a little way.
‘I would I think that’s the claim that Spitting Image can make.’
He highlights how there was ‘actual outrage’ when the Queen Mother’s puppet was made.
Asked about the purpose of the show, he adds: ‘Spitting Image was a complete failure if the intention was to bring down the Tories.
‘It only existed under a Tory government. What Spitting Image did in a way was enhance Mrs Thatcher’s reputation. And we didn’t realise it at the time.’
‘We had a sketch, for example, where there was a scientist who he was looking down a microscope, and he was analysing Mrs. Thatcher’s blood, and was basically saying, this creature is indestructible.’
As in Ridley Scott’s Alien, which had then just been released, Mrs Thatcher was depicted with several mouths, one of which promptly ate the scientist.
He adds: ‘If you’re a politician, what would you want? Somebody to describe you as being weak and an imbecile or somebody describe you as being indestructible?’
Thankfully, Spitting Image was equally brutal to politicians of all stripes.
David Steel, the final leader of the Liberal party, was cruelly depicted living in the top pocket of his colleague David Owen, the erstwhile Labour Foreign Secretary who led the breakaway Social Democratic Party.
‘It wasn’t particularly against the ideology of the Tory party, though it was. But it certainly wasn’t in favour of the ideology of the Labour Party either,’ Steve says.
‘Producer John Lloyd basically said its a raspberry blow to the rich and famous every Sunday night.
‘And the nation needed that, I think, in that period.
‘And it was a big raspberry as well, you know, and probably we wouldn’t be able to get away with it today.
‘You’d upset somebody and then it will get on Twitter, and then it would be taken out of context.
‘And then, somebody would say “I’m offended by this”.
That confusion at the modern ability to take offence stems in part from the ‘toughness’ bred by Steve’s difficult upbringing.
After his mother died when he was aged just nine, he was raised by his grandparents in a tiny terraced house that had no outside toilet.
His grandmother, Mary, was a ‘staunch Conservative’ who later did not approve of Steve making fun of Mrs Thatcher on Spitting Image. Instead, she watched That’s Life.
‘Everybody assumed she was Labour because of where she lived,’ Steve says.
‘Labour used to come in the car to collect you and take you to the polling station. She always used to go in the Labour car and then vote Conservative.’
His comedy career started out with gigs in tough working men’s clubs.
‘I was brought up on live entertainment on the northern clubs, so that’s what I went into. I survived them. I wasn’t that great, but I learned toughness,’ he says.
He perfected his Thatcher voice when still a teenager, after the politician became Tory Party leader.
‘It was 1975, she had just been made Leader the Opposition, and [comedian] Mike Yarwood attempted to do it.
‘And I remember watching it and thinking it’s not very good. He really just didn’t get it at all. The pitch of his voice wasn’t right.
‘I sat in front of a mirror and switched the television off,’ he adds, moments before switching seamlessly into Mrs Thatcher’s voice.
‘I simply sat and started speaking as Mrs. Hatcher, as she used to speak, in the 1970s, when it was a much higher voice and much more slightly posher shall we say than it became.’
Whilst Mrs Thatcher’s voice got deeper after she consulted a speaking coach, Steve insisted on using her earlier, more shrill tones for Spitting Image.
‘With Spitting Image particularly, you mustn’t be accurate. What you had to do is you had to match to the image of the puppet, the puppet was more important than your voice.
‘You could do a brilliant impersonation of somebody but it was useless if it didn’t match the character of the of the caricature.’
He got his role on the programme after writing to producer John Lloyd and telling him he could voice Mrs Thatcher.
‘He agreed to see me as a joke, I discovered afterwards, because he thought I’d make a good bar story that this 22-year-old kid claimed to be able to do Mrs Thatcher.
‘I said, “I don’t want to audition, but if you ask me a question, I’ll answer it as Mrs. Thatcher.”
‘So he asked me a question about unemployment. And I went straight into the voice.
‘My whole body changed and I did the voice and movement and the eyes. He was taken aback.’
The show’s co-creator, Roger Law, then came into the room. After being asked to repeat his impression, Steve said in Mrs Thatcher’s voice: ‘Goodness me, I do not take orders from men.’
‘He loved the idea of a man doing Mrs. Thatcher and I was basically given the job on the spot,’ Steve adds.
But what made Spitting Image so successful?
‘It was was very, very lucky in its leading characters, because they were all by nature, funny.
‘Thatcher was funny. Ronald Reagan was funny, [Soviet leader] Gorbachev was funny, he had a little patch on his head and all that sort of stuff.’
Roy Hattersley – whose speech impediment was perfectly echoed by Steve – did come to understand the offensive ethos of Spitting Image.
‘He said to me, “do you ever consider that it’s rather offensive for you to be impersonating somebody that’s got a slight speech deficit and making fun of them?”
‘And I said, “Well, you’re a politician, and you deserve all you get”. And he said, “I actually agree with that”. And he was fine about it. He understood,’ Steve says.
But, like every successful show, the original Spitting Image had ultimately run its course when it came to an end in 1996.
‘The problem with Spitting Image was that once you had Mrs Thatcher at the urinal, once you had the Royal Family doing what the Royal Family did, there was a limit to what you could do in terms of shock.
‘Once you’d had all these puppets that you weren’t supposed to have then where do you go next?
‘It was the same joke again, and again and again. And every show has its day.’
Steve now devotes much of his time to writing. His efforts so far have focused on two time travel-themed books.
Novel The Time That Never Was was released in April 2022 and is set to be the first in a series.
The second, Destination Time Travel, explores the world’s obsession with the concept in film and television.
It is time travel that Steve muses on when he recalls how he turned down a minor stage role in favour of waiting for something better to come along.
‘Had I taken the back end of the horse I’d been up in north Wales, I’d never have met John Lloyd, I’d never have been involved in Spitting Image.
‘There’s your time travel, you see? Go back in time and tell the young me what I had to do was turn down the back end of the horse because it would lead to a totally different way of life.’
Steve Nallon’s latest book Destination Time Travel – co-written with Dick Fiddy – and his debut novel The Time That Never Was are available at luath.co.uk