Chris Barrie

So we're just going to read a few of these out.

In January 1991, The British Empire, starring Chris Barry and Pippa Hayward, first premiered on BBC One.

And in January, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was first aired in the UK over on

BBC Two.

Having said that, the spitting image experience, it was like doing a radio show because the team of actors who were, some of us were quite well known and some of us weren't.

So you'd have Chris Barry, who obviously had done sketch shows and And of course, he went on to do The British Empire and Red Dwarf, which was post-Spitting Image.

But he was a well-known figure.

But then people like Harry Enfield, they were on the cusp of fame, so they wouldn't have been known to the public.

And Harry Enfield and John Sessions and a load of it was a really interesting time because you suddenly had this flowering, if you like, of of voiced talent.

Rory Bremner, Chris Barry, you know, all suddenly more or less the same generation.

And pretty much everybody worked on spitting image.

But nobody knew our name.

And of course, the voice performance would be wrong or the puppet would be wrong.

So the first few shows, the puppeteers would be operating it.

And the actors, which is basically me and Chris Barry doing many of the voices in those days, we would stand aside with a microphone and watch and so on.

But it sounded dreadful.

So Louise Gold was the first person to do the voice of the Queen on Spittig Image.

A couple of young impressionists, Steve Nallon and Chris Barry, were taught to operate the puppets.

But eventually, duh, they realized a much better process is to record the scripts first like a radio show with experienced impressionists.

and then have puppeteers practice with those recordings until they get the lip sync right.

The royal family they imagined as a suburban household and so on and so on and so on.

And so the show becomes a proving ground for new writers and for young impressionists.

So on the voice side, you have Chris Barry, Harry Enfield, we talked about last week.

Jan Ravens, Jessica Martin, Steve Coogan.

[laughs] Yeah.

I think Rimmer, played by Chris Barrie, actually had the best lines.

But I loved the banter and the cleverness and the insults that you wanted to be able to remember word for word for next day in the playground.

Mm-hmm.

It is, it is.

Absolutely.

And it's interesting you should m- mention that because, um, from what I've seen, uh, certainly at the start, um, Chris Barrie and Craig Charles did not get on on set.

Ooh.