Psychoville - Series 1 Page 11

Psychoville is an extended comedy thriller featuring a gallery of grotesques, including a pantomime dwarf with psychic powers, a midwife with a creepy plastic baby, a mother-fixated sociopath and a crying-on-the-outside clown. Scattered across the country, the key characters are gradually drawn together by a series of anonymous blackmail letters containing the ominous threat: "I know what you did . . ."

As in The League of Gentlemen, Pemberton and Shearsmith play multiple roles, but this time alongside guest stars including Dawn French, Eileen Atkins and Christopher Biggins. The suspense-driven plot is more coherent and linear than the League's fragmentary, sketch-like format, and more firmly grounded in horror-movie spoof. The duo initially tried to write something "upbeat" in response to the BBC's new-found aversion to bleak comedies, but they were unable to resist the allure of their creepy, clammy heartland.

"We were told they weren't interested in commissioning 'dark' comedies," Pemberton says. "We had to prove ourselves all over again."

"We didn't try to wilfully write something different from the League, because our humour couldn't change," Shearsmith shrugs. "Our obsessions and interests would come out in it anyway."

In other words, Psychoville is similar enough to please hardcore League fans, but different enough potentially to annoy them. Shearsmith likens the limbo-like sensation to being a band with Second Album Syndrome.

With tongues only partly in cheeks, the duo are calling their seven-part series "a Hitchcockian comedy". It certainly wears its Hitchcock homages proudly, but it also features plenty more knowing allusions, including several nods to Stephen King. The title even contains a wry double in-joke: Psychoville was the name given to the League of Gentlemen TV show in Japan and Korea.

"It's the same reason we used Royston Vasey, which is Roy Chubby Brown's name, in the League," Pemberton explains. "It just made us laugh, there's no more to it than that. We had big arguments about that actually. One of the few things we disagreed about."

"I didn't like the title," Shearsmith frowns. "I still don't."

Pemberton and Shearsmith share a Grand Guignol, panto-villain humour that serves as a kind of comedy Trojan horse for some pretty unsavoury subject matter. Psychoville contains strong hints of incest, for example. Viewers who share Shearsmith's fascination with serial killers may even have spotted references to real-life sex murderers in The League of Gentlemen.

"Rose West called her massive dildo the Exocet," Pemberton grins. "That came out in her trial. It made us laugh so we put it in the show: when Pauline's in prison she rents out her Exocet. But no one's going to be offended by that because they won't know where it came from."

Now in their early forties, and both with young children, Pemberton and Shearsmith claim that they have become "more judicious" in their use of gruesome horror. "We're middle-aged men now, I don't think we're as frivolous," Shearsmith says. "We are a bit more cautious."

That said, the duo's only real rule of thumb is whether a subject makes them laugh, however tasteless. "You can't know what people are going to be offended by," Shearsmith adds. "If you try to go down the route of smoothing down all the rough corners, you end up making something that caters for no one and passes everyone by, like a magnolia wall . . . and you get eight series out of it. Ha!"

Although the last League series aired in 2002, Pemberton and Shearsmith have spent the intervening years as ubiquitous guest stars in other people's projects — from Blackpool to Benidorm, Doctor Who to Shaun of the Dead. Now reunited on their first major post-League collaboration, they are plainly feeling the pressure.

"It's strange and terrifying to be on the set of your own thing," Shearsmith nods. "You've got a lot more invested in it and you really want to get it right. It's such a luxury being an actor in somebody else's thing. It's much easier when you have none of that responsibility."

Psychoville was born after the League of Gentlemen's spin-off film and live tour in 2005, when all four members called a hiatus to work on outside projects. But while Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson have concentrated on their side careers as authors, Pemberton and Shearsmith became hungry to write for TV again. The duo's writing partnership actually dates back to their flat-sharing days, in the early 1990s, when the League first arrived in London after meeting at drama college in Leeds.

"We tried doing stuff with all four of us writing together, but that just took too long," Pemberton recalls. "So we settled down into two partnerships just based on geography. Reece and I shared a flat, Jeremy and Mark shared a flat, so we fell into these working patterns."

Describing himself as "dour" and "grumpy", Shearsmith is clearly the glass-half-empty side of this double act. In the League's early days, he was the one protesting about the futility of playing to small audiences in London, right up until their Edinburgh Fringe breakthrough in 1996.

"That's probably the most exciting it's ever been," he recalls, "to have an audience that was not just our friends, laughing out of pity. People who paid money and didn't even know us! Because I'd spent so many nights thinking: 'Why are we doing this? It's going to be the same five people!' But I remember Jeremy saying: 'We must keep going.' "

He was right, of course. After their Edinburgh success, the League graduated to Radio 4 in 1997, then BBC Two in 1999. With its David Lynchian mood and dense layers of in-jokes, the TV show swiftly became the kind of comedy that obsessive cults are built on.

All four League members are transplanted northerners who moved to London almost two decades ago. They maintain a low profile off screen, Pemberton says, because "we consider ourselves actors and writers, not personalities". It was only when the group toured nationwide that the full scale of their cult following became clear.

"Going on tour with the League of Gentlemen was the first time we got a sense of what it meant to people," Pemberton says. "It is important to keep in touch with that. I'd be more interested to know what my brother's friends in Lancashire think of Psychoville that what we four think, or the London media village."

In a bizarre portent of Psychoville, during their 2005 tour each member was sent an anonymous death threat by post. "I never saw my letter," Shearsmith says, "but Jeremy read his. It was very personal, it had a lot of detail, but they could have got that off Wikipedia so he didn't know how seriously to take it. Nothing ever came of it, we didn't call the police. But we were a little more wary about stepping out into a massive crowd at the end of the night."

The League of Gentleman may have last graced our TV screens in 2002, but the show's influence has been inescapable ever since. Their signature blend of cinematic production values, grotesque characters and nightmarish surrealism has colonised the comedy cosmos, from Shameless to Nighty Night to Ideal. Even Channel 4's overhyped crime drama Red Riding had an unintended whiff of Royston Vasey in its infernal northern Gothic ambience.

Little Britain, of course, also owes a clear debt to the League. Both shows shared a director, while Gatiss originally served as script consultant for Lucas and Walliams. When I suggest there are obvious parallels, Pemberton and Shearsmith shift uncomfortably.

"That question comes up a lot so there must be something in it," Shearsmith says carefully. "But it's disingenuous of us to say, yeah, they ripped us off. We are all friends, and their show is very different from ours, because it's reliant on you knowing what you're going to get." Ouch.

Although Psychoville ends with a flurry of dramatic revelations, Pemberton and Shearsmith have left enough loose ends for more series. But they do not rule out a League of Gentlemen reunion. In January, all four met up for a tenth anniversary celebration of their TV debut, where a League revival was discussed.

"We're not sick of it," Shearsmith explains, "it's more like coming to it like fans, realising we had something precious and not wanting to repeat it. That's the thing you dread, people saying you are just treading water."

With this in mind, the duo are bracing themselves for the inevitable, unflattering comparisons between Psychoville and The League of Gentlemen.

"You can't escape the triumph of the League," Shearsmith adds. "Certain people loved it and cherished it. Even if this is better, they won't think it is."

An angst-ridden pause follows. "So, as soon as you have any success," he concludes glumly, "you're f**ked."

He's joking, of course. But not smiling.