Behind the scenes of TV’s first deep fake comedy: ‘None of it is illegal. Everything is silly’
Spencer Jones beckons me into a Soho editing suite. “Do you want to see some of the stuff we’ve done so far?” he asks, readying a clip of his new ITV sketch show. It’s funny enough; a young impressionist does an impersonation of Tom Holland griping about something in his flat.
But then Jones stands up and walks me through to a different room. He closes the door and opens up a laptop. “Now watch this,” he says, grinning. It’s the same clip: same script, same flat, same line delivery. But there’s one small difference – this time, incredibly, the sketch is being performed by Tom Holland. Except it isn’t. My jaw drops open, and my eyes start flitting around wildly, unable to compute what I’m seeing. In other words, I have just had my first experience of Deep Fake Neighbour Wars.
The show, in a nutshell, is this: we meet a bunch of celebrities, who all, basically, except the faces of the performers are obscured by photorealistic images of the celebs. The effect is eerily seamless. Flick on to an episode by accident, and you’ll be doomed to spend a minute or two wondering why the hell multimillionaire movie superhero Tom Holland has decided to slum it on an ITV sketch show.
