Due to be published in January 2027
Law and Disorder
Caricaturists are the anarchists of the visual arts.
Growing up in the Fens of East Anglia, once famed as the grim hiding place for metropolitan outlaws and runaway slaves, Roger Law always felt the need for a good laugh. Fortunately for us all he would find it. Most obviously by becoming the evil genius behind Spitting Image, the award-winning TV show featuring caricature puppets that convulsed the nation for decades, and in revised form, now on YouTube.
With this book, Law tells the background story of how to prompt as well as experience mirth. All this with brilliant illustrations designed to get his totally irreverent social and political messages across.
Much of the text draws on Law’s own long life as a caricaturist, but it is also well supplemented by insights into the work of the great exponents of the art of anarchy, both past and present. This makes Law and Disorder a rich mine for any young caricaturists setting out with disorderly intentions today. As for the rest of us, it’s simply magnificent entertainment.
Roger Law used to be famous. He was the artist and energy behind the topical satirical television series Spitting Image. The success of the UK programme, which pilloried the rich and famous, ironically made him rich and famous.
In the previous decades, from the early 1960s, Law had worked across the media drawing, making prints and modelling caricatures for publications such as The New York Times, The Observer, The Sunday Times, and Der Spiegel. He teamed up with Peter Fluck (Luck & Flaw) and it became a natural progression for them to make their static caricatures into puppets for television. The first series of Spitting Image went out in 1984 and for the next thirteen years Law was kept busy meeting impossible deadlines.
When the show closed in 1997 he did what some people thought was the only decent thing he could do; possibly ever had done. He transported himself to Australia. Although he had lost his appetite for modelling caricatures he retained a fascination with the surreal and grotesque, and carried this over into his work as a ceramicist. Roger travelled extensively in Australia and China, but is now living back on the North Norfolk coast with his wife Deirdre.