The League Of Gentlemen

The dark humour of this cult classic sitcom-cum-sketchshow used to scare me slightly.  Its first TV series appeared back in 1999 when I was still a rather sheltered Surrey schoolboy.  I was known for things like having the most housepoints in the year and being good at drawing.  Subversive comedy seemed unnecessary: how could you laugh when something was horrible?  This is probably why I harboured such a soft spot for Keeping Up Appearances.  Nevertheless, I was drawn to The League Of Gentlemen.  The characters were inordinately quotable, and many a playground conversation consequently descended into recitations of the episodes’ scripts.  I could therefore seek solace in recognising the key players from the village of Royston Vasey.  For example, Tubbs and Edward were vile, but also ridiculous.  Once they started talking about local shops for local people, there was safety in the catchphrase, allowing me to overlook the brief references to burning bodies on the moor, to the fact that nobody ever left Royston Vasey… alive.

But as each would-be customer of their Local Shop slowly arrived at the realisation that they had set foot in a terrible place, chills would shiver down my spine.  And that’s why I have chosen The League Of Gentlemen this week.  I am that unsuspecting stranger, hoping for the best (or at least not fearing the worst).  And England is that Local Shop.  I’ve finally seen its grotesque nature for what it is, and all too late in the day.  Trapped and doomed, I await my grisly fate.  But hey, that’s enough election chat for this post – I don’t want to make things too political at the expense of being silly!

For those that don’t know this classic contribution to our horrendous nation’s comedy canon, The League Of Gentlemen is a series of interlinked sketches set in a fictional northern settlement.  Everything about it is sinister, and only those that live there can in any way tolerate its ways.  These ways can sometimes get pretty fantastical, but its thanks to the performances and the writing of the actual gentlemen in this league that they are as believable as they are sickening and entertaining.  My tastes in adult life have caught up with their subversion, so let’s take a Top Trumps moment to go through these not-so-gentle men (in no particular order):

Reece Shearsmith

Best character:  Credit has to be given for Edward (of Tubbs and Edward fame).  While his sister-wife channels a Skeksis-like degree of naïve mischief (see post on The Dark Crystal), Edward’s more plausible stance as your recognisable local bigot is almost therefore the straight man to her easier laughs (counting to twelvty and touching her precious things).  His distrust of outsiders makes him the perfect parochial Tory.

Close second:  Bitterly lampooning the class-sensitive wives of middle earners, Judee Levinson’s spot-on believability is a triumph in its own right.  But contrasted with working-class cleaner, Iris Krell, then this lady-on-help passive-aggression reaches new levels of acid tongue.

Steve Pemberton

Best character:  Everyone has ended up a third party to some awful couple’s petty arguments.  Pemberton plays Charlie Hull, husband of Stella, and together they turn any location into a theatre of war for the years of resentment their marriage has given them.  While anyone would prescribe a divorce, the Hulls can turn any environment into a tense hotbed of angry grudges.

Close second:  Running the Royston Vasey Jobcentre with as much efficacy as Little Britain’s Marjorie Dawes runs her Fat Fighters branch, Pauline Campbell-Jones has a terrifying universality to her.  Patronising yet clueless herself, we’ve all worked with a Pauline.  The lipstick alone makes me want to wash my face.

Mark Gatiss

Best character:  Clad in Val Denton’s lank long hair, Gatiss’s mumsy mannerisms and ability to make far-fetched lines sound totally humdrum result in a subtly gruesome creation.  Along with husband Harvey, and creepy twin daughters Chloe and Radclyffe, the Dentons’ household is every unusual family visit you’ve ever been forced to endure.  From the toad fascination to Harvey’s masturbation obsession, and not forgetting the first Monday of every month (nude day – something we all suspect our neighbours of doing), we share their nephew Benjamin’s terror that he may never be able to leave.

Close second:  Hilary Briss, the local butcher famed for his special stuff, was probably the hardest character for my young mind to stomach.  Even the name causes me shudders now.  Briss.  Urgh.

Jeremy Dyson

Best character:  He doesn’t play any of them – he just writes with the others.  Well done him.  I wouldn’t be able to resist dressing up and getting on camera, but that’s just me.

I could go on for ages, reminiscing of my favourites, but we’ve got lives to lead.  You’ll have to resurrect your own memories of Papa Lazarou, Herr Lipp or Legz Akimbo (put yourself in a child), or maybe seek out this classic if you’ve never seen it before, but there’s one final sketch I have to fuss over, simply as it remains one of my most quoted pieces of comedy and yet still makes me laugh.  Enter stage right, Pamela Doove.  Another Shearsmith performance, this budding actress just needs to nail some diction challenges to hit the big time, as exemplified in this orange juice advert audition.  While the joke is obvious, even Jed Hunter’s small-time director is just one of the many subtler creations that enhance Royston Vasey’s realism.  Strangely prescient, then, that this British settlement should seem so normal and acceptable on the surface.  Scratch beneath and it is truly grotesque by its very nature.  Unlike Europe, we can never leave.

Prison Break

Welcome to the blogpost on Prison Break, or Why Some Shows Should Only Have One Series Really.  It’s been a light week from a TV viewing perspective.  New home ownership has seen my evening and weekend hours spent away from my favourite screen (and I haven’t bought a telly yet), whether that be spiralling in Old Kent Road B&Q because I don’t know what drill to buy, or spiralling at home because I’ve drilled fixings into the wrong bit of wall and totally destroyed the home I’ve saved for ten years to buy, or spiralling with happiness now that I’ve finally got a blind up over the bedroom window, sparing my new neighbours (and any innocent passer-by) the daily torment of my genitalia appearing in their line of vision while I’m putting my pyjamas on.  And yes, the whole blog so far has been about me putting a blind up.  Buying a flat has made me the most boring person in the world and I know this because my friends have not been shy in confirming it to me.

But this means we are indeed trawling the archives of old stuff I watched when my life still had hope.  Why prisons?  Well, thanks for that question.  It’s nice when we’re interactive, isn’t it?  I’ve been partly inspired by the return for a seventh and final series of Orange Is The New Black.  One of the good things about my flat (cue more boring chat – let’s call it flat chat) is that I have a bath again, but I get bored in there quickly, as lying inert in scalding water waiting for Epsom salts to assuage the cramps of my Crossfit-overtrained limbs and unravel the angry knots in my back isn’t as entertaining as I would like.  I’ve therefore been taking my laptop into the bathroom with me, positioning it away from the water on an old duvet box and enjoying me a bit of on-demand premium content while my glasses steam up and my fingertips go all pruney.  This is how I got through the mind-boggling second series of Dark (even more wildly ambitious that the first outing – watch it now).  I then thought I could catch up on the latest The Handmaid’s Tale in there (this is over a number of bathing occasions – I haven’t just been in the tub for weeks in one go) but Channel 4 only have the catch-up rights to that for twenty-five minutes or so after broadcast.  So off I went to trusty old Netflix to catch up with the ladies of Litchfield.  I’d forgotten who most of them were, but I soon remembered that I loved them.

Prisons, then…  A friend first showed me Prison Break during my final year of university.  We’re no longer in touch, but that is not a result of his boxset recommendations.  When people ask where I studied, I like to retort with a bit of modesty and say Hogwarts.  I’m not actually a wizard, but people’s viewing experience of the Harry Potter films is the best way to bring to life the realities of my tertiary education.  I loved learning so much that I got myself into ye olde Oxford University, where diversity meant someone didn’t go to Eton (I didn’t) and a Scout was a local woman who smoked in your bedroom whilst wearing a tabard and changing an empty bin.  I’m only naming the place for context: my college days were spent working hard.  Not as hard as I should have, but the workload was inordinate.  The approaching final exams, then, which accounted for 100% of my degree, rendering the whole four-year faff (with year abroad) an excessive preamble, only served to ramp up the fervent book-learning.

But each night we allowed ourselves an hour of leisure before bed, and that’s where the Prison Break DVDs got whipped out.  My friend wanted me to watch the whole of season one to demonstrate its mastery of the art of suspense.  He was righter than ever.  Each instalment ended on such an earth-shattering cliff-hanger, that we were succumbing to the concept of Just One More Episode long before I realised my life would end up with me writing an unpopular blog.  If you haven’t watched it, you’ve probably guessed that the storyline revolves around people breaking out of prison.  Pow, there’s your narrative tension straightaway.  Our hero is Michael Scofield.  He is so determined to break out his unjustly incarcerated brother (though he deserved his sentence for crimes against the male plunging neckline, by having a plunging neckline) that he has elaborate escape plans tattooed over his entire body and then commits a bank robbery to place himself within the prison walls.  Wentworth Miller’s growling, earnest whispers characterise his every line, while Dominic Purcell as the wrongly accused Lincoln Burrows barely grunts in return.  At each stage of progressing their plan some sort of compromise would be contrived that forced them to link in one more escapee.  Some we rooted for, like dear old Sucre, overreacting to everything, while the sinister sexual predation of T-Bag made skin crawl, though it did prompt discussions about who would be whose prison bitch.  Apparently, you just need to turn one of your pockets inside out and whoever held onto the protruding material was yours to do bitch things with.

Their chances of success were stretched out over a phenomenal first series, with twists, turns and panic-inducing disasters.  I’ve got to be careful to give away any spoilers, but if your whole first series is about breaking out of prison, where do you go from there?  Subsequent series, which I won’t dwell on here, became echoes of this first burst in descending order of volume.  Some characters would be on the run, others would be wrongly imprisoned elsewhere, someone else would be trying to break into another prison.  Then the womenfolk were getting imprisoned as well.  And throughout, LJ (Lincoln Burrows’ awful son) was gurning at the camera and chewing the scenery in response to the implausibility of it all.  To expand on some sort of justification for the whole thing, naughty corporation The Company was suddenly invented, along with some very devoted employees (I hated Gretchen), and I began to question my viewing choices.

In conclusion, some series really should only have had one series.  It’s called the Lost effect.  A good idea works really well as a single arc, but then gets stretched out to capitalise on audience demands till it snaps.  It’s like when someone brings salted caramel M&Ms to the office and you really enjoy having just one, but then suddenly everything is a blur and you’ve eaten 75 of them.  Prison Break even came back for a fifth series in 2017, but our only focus must remain the masterpiece that is the premier season.  That is its legacy.  And also, tattooing things on your body in case you’re worried you might forget about them later.