Britain’s most disturbing comedy returns after 15 years
After a 15-year hiatus, Britain’s scariest comedy series is back. Chris Harvey comes face to face with The League of Gentlemen
Something strange is stirring in the North. The League of Gentlemen is back. It is nearly two decades since BBC Two viewers got their first glimpse of Royston Vasey, the fictional town that was home to some disturbingly odd characters – like shop owners Tubbs and Edward, who were so suspicious of anyone who wasn’t “local” that unfamiliar customers were in mortal danger; or Restart officer Pauline from the job centre, who hated the “dole scum” forced to attend her classes; or the vet, Mr Chinnery, whose every operation ended in a pet fatality.
After three series, a film and a touring stage show, the show’s creators and stars – Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss and non-performing writer Jeremy Dyson – moved on. Gatiss would go on to cowrite and star in Sherlock, Shearsmith and Pemberton would create Inside No 9, Dyson would continue to write for stage and television – and move back to Yorkshire.
But the show’s cult status never went away. And when it popped up on Netflix in 2013, a new generation began watching. In a radio interview last year, Gatiss told listeners that the four would probably return to do a Brexit special of the show, because Britain had become “a local country for local people”. That special became three episodes, starting tonight, although there is no hint when I meet the team that Gatiss’s on-air gag is part of the plot. Does he believe that the town would have voted for Brexit? “The people of Royston Vasey are so strange, I wouldn’t like to presume their politics,” he laughs.
It is Gatiss’s 51st birthday, which he’s celebrating in an unusual way. He’s dressed – or rather undressed – as Val Denton, the insanely ordered housewife, who when The League first aired could sometimes be found having a “nude day” with her equally fastidious husband Harvey. Today appears to be another one of those – although Gatiss is wearing a dressing gown in the interests of feminine modesty. He, Pemberton, Shearsmith and Dyson are all sitting round a table during a break from filming at the old Coronation Street studios in Manchester.
Shearsmith, who will be in New York rehearsing for Martin Mcdonagh’s Olivieraward-winning play Hangmen when the show goes out, says these three shows feel more exciting to him than the originals “because those were our sketches, cobbled together, and the town was the glue. [This time] we feel like we’ve written a story where each ending gives you a bit of a cliffhanger.”
They returned to the Derbyshire town of Hadfield to film the location shots, in which Royston Vasey is shown to have fallen on hard times. “The town was quite gentrified,” says Dyson. “We had to spend quite a lot of money making it look rubbish.” The residents welcomed them back warmly but news had spread among the show’s fans to the extent that filming was accompanied by the sort of crowds normally reserved for Sherlock, all taking sneak pictures to post on Twitter. Recreating the sets and costumes was equally difficult. Everything had been thrown away, and recapturing the vintage wallpaper of the Dentons’ house, for instance, involved redrawing it on a computer and having it printed specially. (It was then hung upside
down by mistake and had to be printed again.) Budgets were tight. One scene that included a live gorilla had to be rewritten with a kitten instead.
How had it all come about? “We’d been circling each other for two or three years with the idea of it,” says Dyson. “We kept having meals out together, and started getting nostalgic about it.” There was anxiety about whether the chemistry would still be there. The League had always been comprised of two writing partnerships: Pemberton and Shearsmith had continued to work as a duo on Psychoville and Inside No 9; but Dyson and Gatiss hadn’t sat down to write together since 2005. “The minute we did sit down to do it, that anxiety just went out of the window because it was as if no time had passed,” says Dyson. “We might as well have been doing it last week.”
They focused as they always had on writing to make each other laugh, only working on the characters about whom they felt they still had something to say, and imagining that time had continued passing in Royston Vasey just as it had in the real world, so everyone was nearly 15 years older.
“The first [new] thing Reece and I wrote was for the Legz Akimbo theatre troupe,” says Pemberton. “It was filmed in a school on a Sunday with a group of kids who didn’t know the characters. We bounded out and Mark started doing a rap with his baseball cap on about ‘Stranger danger’ and I
‘There are quite a few characters that you might take a sideways glance at and wonder if they’re suitable for 2017’
was standing in the wings watching him and I just had this big smile on my face, thinking, I can’t believe we’re back here doing this.”
The League began in 1994 as a pub stage show; it won the Perrier Award in Edinburgh in 1997, becoming a Radio 4 show in the same year, and a TV show in 1999. In the early days, journalists never failed to mention that its creators were from the North. Shearsmith found it frustrating. “We’d be in tuxedos looking like an Oxbridge revue show, and when we opened our mouths we were like the Hovis ads. It was slightly patronising this idea of ‘Northern lads’.” He slips into a chirpy TV presenter voice: “‘They come from up North and they’ve managed to put a sketch show together.’ I felt that if it was four southern lads, it wouldn’t be mentioned.”
For all that, Shearsmith says, their comedy is informed by a Northern sensibility. “We always had a thing for Alan Bennett and Victoria Wood – authored voices that rang true to us. We wanted to try to emulate them. And there were documentaries as well, lots of First Tuesday and Dispatches from the early Nineties, with extraordinary stories that we would watch and videotape and become obsessed with.”
Other early influences included actors such as Ronnie Barker and Leonard Rossiter, who gave a human depth and heart to their comic creations, something also evident in Royston Vasey’s parade of grotesques.
No one wants to reveal all the characters who are returning, but some of the originals certainly create issues in these days of heightened sensitivities and social media. Herr Lipp, for instance, played by Pemberton, is a German teacher and paedophile, who buried a schoolboy alive in series two; Papa Lazarou, played by Shearsmith, is a blacked-up circus ringmaster, who breaks into women’s houses, and tells them frighteningly, “You’re my wife now.”
Producer Adam Tandy, who also produced The Thick of It, says there are “quite a few characters that you might take a sideways glance at and wonder if they’re completely suitable for an audience in 2017.” But, he says the intention has always been to “try to find a way of running up against as many editorial guidelines as possible, but just stop short of crossing the line”.
He believes The League of Gentlemen holds a unique place in British comedy. “They’ve been so influential, it’s the wellspring of a whole chunk of people doing sketch material and a darker thing that had never been seen in comedy before… it’s almost Proustian – just say Royston Vasey to someone and instantly you’re in that world.”
They’re hoping for three or four million viewers, after iplayer is taken into account, but it could be the start of something big. Does Shearsmith think they would ever take The League back out on stage? “I think we would. I think we’ve had such a good time, it would not be beyond us to think we could do another celebratory live show.”
In fact, Pemberton admits: “We did end up writing more than we shot, so maybe there should be another series…” Not all the characters will make it that far though, as Tandy confirms. “Lots of people die… It’s Royston Vasey!”
The League of Gentlemen is on BBC Two tonight at 10pm