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While much new television comedy was embracing a closely-observed 'reality'
(The Royle Family, BBC, 1998-2000; The Office, BBC, 2001-03), The League of
Gentlemen turned its back on suburban normality and mined a rich seam of gothic
inspiration in the fictional North England town of Royston Vasey, paving the way
for similarly dark humour from Nighty Night (BBC, 2004-06) to Funland (BBC,
2005).
Taking their name from a 1959 heist comedy, the League (Jeremy Dyson, Mark
Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith) followed a time-honoured route to
television via an Edinburgh Fringe show and Radio 4. For the screen, the black
tie minimalism of their live revue became a panoramic sketch/sitcom hybrid, with
longer character-based scenes punctuated by sight gags and 'quickies'. Except
for Dyson, each writer-performer played numerous characters, frequently in drag
or behind heavy prosthetic make-up.
Among Royston Vasey's numerous grotesques are pig-snouted shopkeepers Edward
and Tubbs, who fear (and usually kill) anyone not 'local'; mild but deadly vet
Dr. Chinnery; Pauline, a bullying, pen-obsessed Jobcentre advisor; and the
demonic Hilary Briss, who triggers a nosebleed epidemic with the addictive
'special stuff' sold under-the-counter at his butcher's shop. Perhaps most
unforgettable is Papa Lazarou, a blackface kidnapper whose rasping catchphrase,
"You're my wife now", is the stuff of nightmares.
The show's cinematic aspirations, evident from its regular allusions to
horror classics such as The Elephant Man (d. David Lynch, 1980) and Don't Look
Now (d. Nicolas Roeg, 1973), were serviced by extensive location filming around
Hadfield, Derbyshire, now a site of pilgrimage for League devotees. A lavish
2000 Christmas Special was still more filmic, telling three ghoulish
supernatural tales through a linking narrative, in a nod both to British
television's dormant tradition of Yuletide ghost stories and to 'portmanteau'
horror compendium films such as Dead of Night (1945). Recognisable comedy cues
were all-but discarded, with no laughter track and little in the way of actual
jokes.
The humour turned even darker in the third series, each episode of which
focused on the tribulations of a single character, including Alvin the
guesthouse proprietor, whose wife and friends die in a botched experiment in
autoerotic asphyxiation. Though a critical success, the minimal promotion it
received betrayed an anxiety that the League's grand guignol was becoming
increasingly baffling to the uninitiated.
The League's big-screen ambitions were finally realised in 2005 with The
League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse (d. Steve Bendelack).
James Donohue
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Complete episode (29:51)
