A short clip from "Psychoville" introducing the character of Joy played by Dawn French and her baby doll Freddie. "Psychoville" is set to hit our screens in June.
Neurologists with theories about laughter currently believe the nerves that produce a big fat guffaw are in the part of the brain that deals with respiration. Laughter is essential, in other words — as natural as breathing. Which clearly can’t be entirely true. We breathe all the time. But jokes are constantly changing — styles come in and out of fashion and comedians who once set the agenda may suddenly struggle to stay on the stage.
Take, for our thesis, The League of Gentlemen. It’s hard to think of a more influential troupe from recent comedy history. “They probably changed stand-up for ever,” says the comic Marcus Brigstocke. “When they arrived in Edinburgh in the mid-1990s, they were doing these incredible sketches and characters with just rubber bands on their faces and sheer energy. It made comics realise they weren’t limited to stand-up.”
Series such as Little Britain and The Catherine Tate Show, featuring grotesque and maddening characters locked in cycles of behaviour, also owe much to the distorted inhabitants of the League’s fictional town of Royston Vasey. Indeed, League member Mark Gatiss and its director, Steve Bendelack, worked on Little Britain’s first series. League members helped out with Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes’s Spaced, appeared in and wrote for Doctor Who, as well as taking roles in or helping out with the scripts on Nighty Night, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s Catterick, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Shaun of the Dead and Benidorm — if there’s been something on screen that’s dark and funny, they have probably had a hand it.
So it came as a bit of a shock when, a couple of years ago, two of the League found their jokes weren’t considered funny any more. “Reece (Shearsmith) and I had been working on this script, took it to the BBC and were told they weren’t interested in dark comedy now,” explains Steve Pemberton — who, in The League of Gentlemen played, among others, Tubbs, that “local” shopkeeping femme bizarre. “So we thought, we’re stuffed.” “They said they wanted it big and funny,” adds Shearsmith, who played Tubbs’s brother-cum-lover, Edward. “We thought, what’s that? It’s a Knockout? But we wrote this anyway, and it’s not big and funny. It’s dark and little.”
“This” is Psychoville, named, with loving irony, after the title given to The League of Gentlemen when the series was sold to Japan and Korea. It’s a seven-part, cliff-hanging comedy thriller that weaves the lives of several apparently unconnected oddballs into a complex tale of blackmail and thwarted desire. The main characters begin the series with separate lives in separate towns. There’s Robert, a pantomime dwarf hopelessly in love with the beauty playing Snow White; Joy, a brutally honest midwife who treats her demonstration doll as a real baby; David, a hapless mummy’s boy obsessed with serial killers; Mr Jelly, a children’s entertainer with one hand missing who fashions appalling attachments for children’s parties; and Mr Lomax, a blind recluse with a dodgy community-service home help. All receive a mysterious letter saying, simply, “I know what you did.” They don’t know who sent it and can’t figure out why. This, it turns out, was the hook that landed the dark and little thing a BBC commission.
“The commissioning editor said, who’s writing these letters?” Shearsmith says, smiling. “We didn’t actually know at that point. We just wrote all these red herrings and cliffhangers we thought people would love and want the answers to. So they said, write another two. We managed that. Then we did the read-through, and there was a long gap before it was greenlit — and then we had to write the rest.”
“At the time, we were thinking, why do we have to prove ourselves?” Pemberton admits. “But it hones what you’re doing. And it shouldn’t be easy to get something on television. You should have to work hard for it. You can become complacent after three series, and this shocked us out of that.”
It’s not clear whether a fourth series of The League of Gentlemen would have faced the same resistance. Such a show has long been rumoured, but never been confirmed or denied — today included. What is clear is that, after their 2005 movie, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, Mark Gatiss needed a break. The foursome (including the co-writer Jeremy Dyson) had been working together since they met as students. “It did feel like a natural break,” Pemberton nods. “So we said, yes, let’s have a break, as long as we can do a show as well. Reece and I wrote together on the League, and Mark and Jeremy had projects they wanted to write separately.”
The split meant certain changes. For a start, Pemberton and Shearsmith decided to recruit other actors. Thus Dawn French plays Joy, Christopher Biggins plays himself, while Eileen Atkins, Nicholas Le Provost, Daisy Haggard and Janet McTeer all have roles. “There are whole scenes that happen without us in them,” Shearsmith explains. “Which was quite scary, because we’d never had that before.” It’s turned out to be a strength, however. Pemberton would have played Joy — and would have turned in something vaguely similar to his nightmarish restart officer, Pauline. French manages to bring both a lightness and a terrifyingly brittle insanity to the role that helps move the whole show away from the lurching horror of the League and into the twisted realms of later Hitchcock. There’s even an episode shot in the style of the Hitchcock classic Rope, in an apparent single take.
“I don’t think Hitchcock was in our minds when writing it particularly, but because it’s laden with thriller elements, the director (Matt Lipsey) said he got a sense of films like Frenzy and Rope,” says Pemberton. “What we can’t have is what we had with the League, where you thought, who are these people? Where has this come from? It was a total surprise. But we hope there’s a new generation who aren’t steeped in the League, because it hasn’t been over-repeated.” “People will compare it to the League,” says Shearsmith, resigned. “It’s very Steve and Reece — it would have been wrong for us to do My Family. If they say it’s like the League, then great, because that was a really good show.” There’s a pause, then Pemberton sighs: “As long as they don’t say this is just not as good as The League of Gentlemen.”
Psychoville is on BBC2 from June 18