The premier league

"Exterminate all rational thought. That’s what I’ve learned.” So explained Peter Weller in David Cronenberg’s sublime adaptation of William Burroughs’ psycho-sexual-fantasia-cum-scalpel-sharp-social-satire, Naked Lunch (for my money the greatest novel of the twentieth century).

And although the advice was relayed in a typically deadpan Burroughsian monotone, since life actively laughs in the face of all attempts to impose order and cohesion upon it, it may well be one of the most sagacious observations you’ll ever happen upon. (Though still not within touching distance of Burroughs’ greatest line: “A paranoid schizophrenic is a guy who just figured out what’s going on.”)
In any case, the inversion of conventional everyday certainties is probably the best approach to take should you ever happen to stray into the northern England town of Royston Vasey. Like a baroque, vaudeville version of Burroughs’ Interzone, this is a place where local shopkeepers abduct customers for ritual sacrifice, menacing butchers surreptitiously deal lethally addictive “special stuff” to favoured customers in shadowy clandestine meetings, and council-appointed restart officers do their utmost to keep their clients out of employment.
If you’re particularly unfortunate, the devil incarnate – in the shape of a demented circus ringmaster named Papa Lazarou – will arrive unannounced at your abode, slither into your front room on the pretext of looking for “Dave”, before bamboozling you with all manner of indecipherable voodoo-jive and stealing your wife.
“Royston Vasey was a sort of composite of the places we’d all grown up in,” reflects Jeremy Dyson, the sole non-acting member of the League of Gentlemen, the team responsible for creating the town. “Although you don’t examine it analytically while you’re doing it, looking back on the early days, that was one of the things we all definitely had in common. And then that idea of just playing around with these different characters in a provincial setting, and finding the humour in it – I mean, I think it was something that was waiting to happen. I suspect if we hadn’t done it, someone else would have. But I’m happy we got there!”
To be frank, I (and I suspect other League fans) also happen to be mightily relieved that Dyson and co. managed to patent their winning formula of hysterical humour and bloodcurdling horror before someone else beat them to the punch. Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s background in drama – allied with Dyson’s exceptional flair for characterisation and narrative – has enabled the quartet to extract every last ounce of pathos and insight from their creations.
The third and most recent series of the show – broadcast at the tail end of 2002 – was their most ambitious project yet. Eliminating the laugh track and expanding the sketch format into a mosaic of plot-driven, inter-woven character studies, the result was a flawed but frequently breath-taking experience which, for my money at least, confirmed that the League Of Gentlemen is (with the possible exception of Brass Eye) the single best comedy show to have surfaced on British TV over the past ten years or so.
As ever, the heart of darkness remained. In one truly monumental sketch, Gatiss plays a necrophiliac mortician who lectures a seemingly innocent group of medical students (in reality a team of undercover police officers) on the desensitising nature of his work. At one point, in between some hilarious deadpan goonery (“Before embalming, I shampoo ‘em with Wash & Go. Quite appropriate I suppose!”), the actor’s face tightens into a withdrawn, disturbed grimace, and he intones the following lines: “When you’ve spent a Christmas morning with some poor woman screaming and screaming and screaming ‘cause her kiddie’s gone under the wheels of a Vauxhall Astra, all the mystery goes out of it somehow. No. There’s no God.”
At such moments, are the team ever worried that they’re shifting the tone too far away from comedy?
“Well, obviously we were aware that that particular monologue was right on the edge,” reasons Dyson. “It was as far as you could really push it and still stay within the parameters of comedy. Having said that, we really try not to think about it too much when we’re writing. We have a basic thing of, ‘Is this making us laugh?’ And if we find it funny, there’s no reason why a more general audience shouldn’t find it funny. But with regard to the mortician sketch, it’s something we were very keen to put in the third series, because it actually pre-dated any of our TV work and we’d always really admired it as a piece of writing.
“But as you were saying, we always have to keep an eye on things to make sure we’re not overstepping the mark. In retrospect, what we were trying to do in the third series – which was to look at the characters in a slightly more in-depth way and tell stories about them – was an almost impossible task, in that to do narrative stuff for half-an-hour and make it funny is very, very difficult. Simply because you have a certain amount exposition to do to set up the story, whilst simultaneously maintaining the humour, and that’s really hard.”
The visual style of the programme seems to have got progressively more cinematic with each series. Do the Gents essentially see themselves as film-makers?
“We’ve always loved that about it,” Dyson affirms. “Even from the start we’d write it that way, and in the scripts it would say ‘We see this, cut to that, dolly with such-and-such a character’, and, yeah, it was quite cinematic I suppose. Actually, even from the time we were doing it on stage, that was there in terms of aspiration. And when we came to make the TV series, it was something that we were very much thinking about.
“In fact, what we did was make a reel for the crew and the director, Steve Bendelack, which had snippets of tonnes of stuff we liked, and gave some flavour of what we were after. Obviously there was stuff like The Wickerman on there, and also Kes, which was a really big thing, believe it or not! They actually ran Kes and decided on what lenses and filters to use for our show. In fact, there’s a chocolate filter used on Kes which was also used for the League! And then there was other stuff we absolutely loved, like Don’t Look Now and Santa Sangre.
“But what’s going to be fascinating is now that we’re actually making a feature, we’ll find out how different it’s going to be on film. It’ll be interesting to see what’s left do in terms of using that grammar.”
Ah yes, the League Of Gentlemen movie. Ever since the show first hit our screens five years ago, rumours have abounded that the team were eager to give Royston Vasey the full silver-screen treatment. Although Dyson is understandably keen to keep plot details under wraps (describing it only as “The League Of Gentlemen meets The Matrix, a proper high concept movie”), perhaps an even more pertinent
consideration is how the episodic
format of the League will adapt to the complex structural requirements of a full-length screenplay.
“As soon as you start, you realise what a challenge it is,” observes Dyson. “Because the thing about television, from a writer’s point of view, is that it’s actually a very forgiving medium. You can leave quite a few cracks in there and it doesn’t matter, because you’re doing it over several weeks and there’s more space in there for the occasional mistake.
“But with a film, what you realise when you begin writing is that there is nowhere to hide, and every single second of it is going to be under scrutiny. Just because it’s so huge – literally, it’s physically huge, you’re writing something that’s got to fill a screen that’s fifty feet high or whatever, and people are sitting there with their arms crossed, saying, ‘Go on then, impress me’. So we’re very, very aware that the attention to detail has to be impeccable, and that’s why we’ve given ourselves plenty of time to get it right. We started on it last June and we’ve been working on it pretty solidly since, so hopefully the time and effort will pay off.”
Finally, can we expect the Gents to regroup for another TV series at some point in the future?
“Oh yeah, I don’t think it’s a one-way door out of television,” replies Dyson. “Probably a lot will be dictated by how successful the film is. I assume that if it’s successful, we’ll probably want to make another one. And if we did do another TV series, I doubt we’d revisit Royston Vasey, I think we’ve probably exhausted the possibilities there.”
One thing’s for sure – wherever the League decide to go next, their loyal following will be more than willing to come along for the ride. With return-ticket clasped very firmly in palm, of course.

The League Of Gentlemen: Series 3 is out now on DVD. Scripts & That, a hardback volume featuring the collected teleplays of all three series plus the Christmas Special, is also available, published by BBC Books