Roger Law
Roger Law (born 6 September 1941) is a British caricaturist, ceramicist and one half of Luck and Flaw (with Peter Fluck), creators of the popular satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image.
In 2020 Roger Law was executive producer on the new series of Spitting Image made with Avalon Productions and streamed on Britbox.
After graduating from Cambridge School of Art, Law started his career working in print, namely magazines.
By 1963, Law was creating a weekly cartoon with Peter Cook for The Observer, a short-lived venture aptly named ‘Almost the end’.
At the same time, Law was also doing a 14 ft long weekly cartoon strip for The Establishment Club, a nightclub opened by Peter Cook in Soho.
That same year Law also worked on album covers for The Who, The Who Sell Out and Jimi Hendrix's Axis Bold as Love.
After a brief stint working in New York at Push Pin Studios with Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, Law returned to the UK in 1969 to be a features editor at The Sunday Times Magazine.
In 1981 Law and Fluck made a plan to transfer political caricatures to television, which was funded by Martin Lambie-Nairn.
In 1985 Spitting Image created puppets for two shows called ‘Michael Nesmith’s Television Parts’ for NBC Network TV, USA.
In 1990 Spitting Image brought out ‘The Real Maggie Memoirs’ and Law published his first book, ‘A Nasty Piece of Work’, written in collaboration with Lewis Chester.
By 1994 Spitting Image had been franchised in countries such as Japan, Czech Republic, Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Germany and Russia.
It was a stop-motion animation featuring a set of characters, living in a grim apartment building in the fictional London postcode of SE69, who were plagued by various dilemmas.
Whilst Roger was at art school, Paul Hogarth, one of his tutors, showed him the French magazine, L’Assiette au Buerre.
L’assiette au Buerre was illustrated front to back with cartoons or caricatures with only a short satirical caption written at the bottom of each page.
During Roger's early career whilst working closely with Peter Cook at The Observer and The Establishment Club he met many satirists including Lenny Bruce, such meetings gave him his first steps to use his drawing skills for satire.
He quotes “Only those who attempt the absurd are capable of achieving the impossible.” Roger has always cited that the ‘family friendly’ puppet show Punch and Judy was a great inspiration when working on Spitting Image, they both pushed boundaries.
The idea that you can have extreme violence, murder, and infanticide yet is still funny and even enjoyed by children was, retrospectively, his first step in creating the grotesque Spitting Image style.
