Carl Jones: It was just great satire - no strings attached

Understated? Sorry, make that over-stated to the point of eye-watering excess. This was puppet-led political satire in its most graphic of tabloid forms.

Maggie Thatcher was a tyrant voiced by a man, Ronald Reagan was a bumbling oaf who'd lost his brain, and members of the royal family were depicted as either elitist dimwits or hippies.

Almost overnight, Spitting Image's exaggerated latex caricatures became the most talked-about stars of the small screen. Young people knew the names of our politicians for the first time ever . . . all thanks to a rag-tag bunch of bearded hippies, ex-Communists and lapsed Catholics who'd never made a telly show in their lives before until they marched into Central Television studios in Birmingham to frighten the bejesus out of the Crossroads production crew.

Around 13 million people had voted for the Tory Government of the time, but Spitting Image's peak weekly audience topped 15 million. The Bafta-winning show became so influential that politicians found themselves struggling to shake off their Sunday night personas.

Poor old diddy David Steele, for example, was depicted living in the pocket of his Social Democrat partner David Owen – an image which set the Liberal Party back years.

Such power was unheard of for a controversial experiment which aired in the post-10pm graveyard slot on a Sunday night. I watched it, my parents watched it, and grandparents across the land watched it too. Bold, brash and arrogant, it was X Factor of its day. In school on a Monday morning, if you couldn't take part in the "Did you see Spitting Image last night?" debate, you were an oddball; an outcast.

There may have been heated disagreements over each show's content – anger, frustration, exhaustion, even despair – but over more than 130 episodes, it never failed to provoke opinion, and debate.

Don't you think we could do with some comedic colour back in our bland and samey world of politics right now, if only to try to engage the detached younger generation? David Cameron must be the first PM in my lifetime who hasn't been truly lampooned on TV.

Is anyone bold enough to change that situation? I doubt it. Spitting Image would never be made today, because programme makers, mired in a world of 'compliance', would be too scared of rocking the political correctness boat with such an uncompromising, potentially offensive cocktail of mockery.

And that's a real pity. I'd love to see what modern-day puppet masters would make of bumbling Boris Johnson, beer-swilling, cigarette smoking Ukip chief Nigel Farage, beetroot-faced shadow chancellor Ed Balls, Alex Salmond's Scottish campaign for independence, and the uncomfortable UK coalition alliance.

We do still have satire, of course, in the shape of hit shows like Mock The Week, Have I Got News For You, and QI. But they work within the long-accepted boundaries of traditional TV. I'm not even sure Spitting Image even acknowledged that these rules existed.