Celebrating the Return of The League of Gentlemen

The League of Gentlemen

The League of Gentlemen have announced that they are returning to the BBC, twenty years after making their debut on BBC Radio 4.

The League first debuted their dark, comedic stage show in 1994 before winning a prestigious Perrier Award in 1997 and were later given their own television series in 1999. The 1990’s were a simpler time: New Labour was going to change the world, every child loved dinosaurs and the sketch show was the king of British comedy television.

The format has always been popular in the UK, but the late 90’s we saw the popularity of the genre explode. The Fast Show, Harry Enfield and Chums, Big Train, Smack the Pony, Goodness Gracious Me plus many more found fame and success, but The League of Gentlemen stood apart from its peers.

I discovered the League of Gentlemen late in January 1999 on BBC 2, following a repeat of Red Dwarf. I had no idea I was about to witness one of the most bizarre and darkest comedy shows ever. Murder, imprisonment and pig-breastfeeding may not sound like the funniest subject matter for a comedy series, but this was really just the tip of the iceberg for the League of Gentlemen. All this darkness came from the minds of the League of Gentlemen themselves, comprised of Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Mark Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson.

The reason The League of Gentlemen stands apart from the multitude of other sketch shows at that time was its overarching plot threads which were all located in the fictional town of Roston Vasey. The League was similar to other sketch shows, with recurring characters, one-shot sketches and catchphrases (especially “Hello Dave!” and “This is a local shop for local people!”), but it also had a small number of stories running through each series, and usually one major one.

Series 1 concerned the building of a new main road to link Royston Vasey to the outside world, and saw local shop residents Edward and Tubbs do everything in their power to stop the construction in an attempt to keep the town local. The second series mainly followed a plot briefly touched upon in the first series, that of butcher Hilary Briss’ ‘special stuff’, which after a mix up begins giving residents deadly nosebleeds. I like the fact that the exact explanation for the special stuff is never given, we know it’s meat, but not human meat, it’s something worse.

Series 3 was an interesting series, but not necessarily a good one. It was given mixed reviews and attempted to mix up the show’s structure. The focus of the show shifted from sketches with a single main plot, to individual contained episodes focusing on a character each. The series did include many sketches but the League chose to focus on smaller characters and less on those one-off, catchphrase based characters. It was probably a correct decision, but the characters they picked simply weren’t the most interesting.

Each episode ended with a snippet of the series finale, and only after viewing all of the episodes does the entire series finale all come together. It was clever and the writing decision to have all the characters come together to form the finale would be used to better effect in Shearsmith and Pemberton’s next series, Psychoville. A movie was released in 2005 called The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, which received a generally positive reception from critics.

The show was a huge success and saw the creators awarded a number of awards including a BAFTA, a British Comedy Award and the prestigious Rose d’Or. The show’s creators have all gone on to have much success, with Mark Gatiss working on Doctor Who and Sherlock (and an upcoming Dracula show), Mark Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith have both created the superb Psychoville and Inside No.9, and the unseen League member Jeremy Dyson has worked on a number of books as a script editor as well as co-creating the very well received BBC 3 show Funland along with the West End show, Ghost Stories.

The anniversary show will most likely be broadcast in 2019, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the BBC 2 show.

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