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Jarvis puppet sold for £15,000
A SPITTING Image puppet of Sheffield-born singer Jarvis Cocker has been bought at auction for a world record £15,000 - by multi-millionaire U2 guitarist The Edge.
The latex likeness went under the hammer at a charity auction in London. The sale price set a new world record for a Spitting Image puppet.
The Edge - real name David Evans - outbid all rivals for the rubbery bespectacled puppet of the famously lanky Pulp frontman.
It is not clear yet what The Edge, who is 47 years old and worth an estimated 100 million, will do with the Cocker puppet or why he was so keen to secure it.
The puppet was one of the star lots at the Music Industry Trust Awards auction in London, also attended by X Factor stars Simon Cowell and Dannii Minogue, Dannii's pop princess sister Kylie, Girls Aloud and Take That. The last time the puppet went under the hammer, at a Sotheby's-Amazon auction in July 2000 of 200 Spitting Image puppets, it sold for just 755.
The previous world record for one of the dolls was 11,224, paid for a Margaret Thatcher lookalike.
Jarvis Cocker, now 45 and living in Paris, was born in Sheffield in 1963.
He and Pulp became rich and famous in the 1990s. This year he contributed a Pulp song, Born To Cry, to the new Tony Christie album of songs by Sheffield writers titled Made In Sheffield.
His puppet was one of hundreds of celebrity likenesses which featured on the satirical TV show Spitting Image, which ran for 13 years from 1984 until 1996.
In 2000 Spitting Image creator Roger Law sold 200 puppets for a total of 370,105, and a further 269 puppets for 157,385 the following year.
Mr Law said at the time: "Spitting Image was a rollercoaster ride without brakes - hard work but great fun.
"I enjoyed taking a swipe at the great and the good, but I hated the puppets."
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