Mark Gatiss

The Vote at Donmar Warehouse, WC2

Is it theatre? Is it telly? Does it boast a preposterously talented cast of 44 that includes Judi Dench, Mark Gatiss and Catherine Tate? Is it any good? The answer to all those questions is a resounding yes, but still The Vote takes a bit of explaining.

The Vote review: all-star election-night farce

Judi Dench, a wonderfully twitchy Mark Gatiss, Catherine Tate and other famous faces make appearances at the polling station in Graham's entertaining ballot-box drama.

Mark Gatiss, interview

The League of Gentlemen and Sherlock star will play Peter Mandelson in Channel 4's drama about the coalition. He tells Michael Hogan about taking on New Labour's éminence grise.

Mapp and Lucia was phenomenal, successive nights of the most deliciously moreish television made last year. The adaptation by Steve Pemberton of E.F. Benson's exquisitely flensed comedy of manners, set in Rye in the 1920s/30s (and it really is still that lovely), when a certain rarefied form of life actually depended on a bustling church noticeboard for its every social, spiritual, ethical, sartorial and sexual sustenance, could have been carried by the eponymous leads alone for the whole three nights.

Miranda Richardson, with the help only of a subtle set of comedy dentures, was Elizabeth Mapp, and Anna Chancellor sublimely haughty as Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas: two women - ladies, actually, in a day when distinctions mattered as mattered life or death - caught in endless twitching frenzies of one-upmanship, all whispered eyebrows and quietly toxic putdowns. Richardson in particular was again phenomenal; her silent lipsticked mouth spoke volumes. It was rainbowed and beaming when happily and hissily besmirching her "friend" with the sarcastic term "precious one", or even when genuinely happy, high on unkindness, after a rare coup: but its cochineal would plummet, in repose, to a clownish moue, a faded curtain of dried lip-lines rusted with frustration. But Chancellor was no slouch; even though she won 90% of the battles, when scorned her wrath was ungovernable, and would have had 90% of ovaries (and every testicle around) fleeing for the Downs.

As I said, they could have carried it themselves, but there was glorious support. Pemberton himself as proto-gay Georgie; Poppy Miller and Mark Gatiss and Nicholas Woodeson, and Rye itself. The plots, such as they were - a dodgy Indian guru, an art competition, a something involving the Prince of Wales - were negligibly delightful. But the subplots - the mutating fashions for friendships, brief fads, the power of money, benign unacknowledged homosexuality, misappreciated appreciation for what passes for intellect (or class), the joy of witchy bitchiness - never more relevant. E.F. Benson left a little more of a canon than this: please, bring it on, and leave Downton looking like the Titanic after the feet got damp.

Mark Gatiss: Dad's Army honours original

Actor and screenwriter Mark Gatiss, responsible for TV hits such as Sherlock and The League of Gentlemen, said the remake of Dad's Army which he appears in will maintain the humour and poignancy of the original.

League of Gentlemen to reunite for 20th anniversary?

Reece Shearsmith says that a collaboration with League of Gentlemen stars Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson may be on the cards.

Mark Gatiss keen on League of Gentlemen return

Mark Gatiss has confirmed that he is open to a League of Gentlemen revival.

Inside No. 9 is magnificent. It is the latest series to emerge from the dark imaginations of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the pair who were also responsible for Psychoville & The League of Gentlemen (with Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson).

Their new series consists of six self-contained, bleakly comic dramas set in six very different No 9s, ranging from a suburban home to a country pile. Like all the best short stories or one-act plays, tonight's episode works with a deceptive and outrageous simplicity. A group of characters are playing a game of sardines. One after the other, they squeeze into a cupboard. Some are partners. Some are engaged. Some are work colleagues. Some have ugly histories in common, and one is a stranger to hygiene. Between them, they cover a wide variety of social backgrounds, sexual orientations and age groups. If a bomb dropped on the cupboard where they were hiding, a good portion of the acting talent in this country would be wiped out.

The high quality ensemble includes Anne Reid, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Katherine Parkinson, Anna Chancellor and Timothy West, all of whom squeeze in alongside Pemberton and Shearsmith. However, this isn't just an inspired set-up performed by a stellar cast, it builds to a macabre and horribly imagined climax.

In praise of ... Mark Gatiss

National treasure status can surely not be far away for the writer of Sherlock and star of The League of Gentlemen.

Psychobitches is a series born out of popular acclaim for last year's pilot. Rebecca Front plays an In Treatment-style shrink for famous females from history, and it was a cracking opener, right from the first moment when Rosa Parks needed a seat in the waiting room and everyone quickly jumped up.

I'm always in the market for a pastiche of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and the one here, featuring Frances Barber as Bette Davis, and Mark Gatiss dragged up as Joan Crawford, was high-camp nirvana. Other highlights included Samantha Spiro as a fey, infuriating Audrey Hepburn, Sharon Horgan's Eva Perón, suffering from "feelings of grandiosity", and the Brontë sisters transformed into bonnet-wearing, foul-mouthed Chucky dolls.

A few of the short sketches needed to be even shorter - as in 100% shorter. On the whole, though, what a treat, to the point where I started hallucinating. It felt as though the screen was glowing, as if I were in a sci-fi movie, where an all-female (sorry, Mark Gatiss) comedy mothership suddenly appears, illuminated and throbbing, the door opening to reveal none other than Emily Wilding Davison laughing her bloomers off. But then I got over myself. It's quite enough that Psychobitches was indisputably funny.