Reece Shearsmith

Like The League Of Gentlemen turned up past 11 - which is a good thing, by the way - Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's grotesque blackmail comedy continues. Tonight, there's the revelation of a terrible secret from the past, which leads on to the discovery that toys can be "commodities" and that dwarf porn is issued under the Midget Gems moniker. God alone knows how it's all going to turn out, but the journey's the thing.

It might have links to The League of Gentlemen, but Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two of that august number, have managed to craft something in Psychoville that feels distinctive in its own right, despite some of the trappings of the former. While the original League had a rotten core at the centre of the dark comedy, there's a surprisingly tragic heart here, exemplified by Joy, Dawn French's doll obsessed midwife. It's hard not to feel sorry for this woman, but at the same time. She's absolutely terrifying, charged with the potential energy to go off and do something abhorrent. Chilling, brilliant and funny.

There was no creative exhaustion evident in Psychoville - the new project from Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton from The League of Gentlemen. Psychoville has a purposeful air to it: as if someone had said: "Right, lads. The plot is: it's a sitcom about psychopaths! No messing about - and let's make sure we've got a scene with an incestuous mother and son scratching each other's eczema before the ten-minute mark, OK?"

As with The League of Gentlemen, most of the characters are played by Shearsmith and Pemberton, in a variety of wigs, prosthetics and pendulous rubber bosoms. It's a bit like a collegiate version of The Nutty Professor, but with jokes about bestiality. Well, just with jokes, really. I don't remember there being any in The Nutty Professor.

Darkest moment so far: Mr Jelly. He's a clown and children's entertainer. "Mr Jelly Keeps Kids Quiet" is the logo painted on the side of his car. Mr Jelly comes to children's parties and combs their hair until they cry. Then he puts lipstick on their eyes.

After That Mitchell and Webb Look came the premiere of Psychoville. This is by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, two of the men who made The League of Gentlemen, a gruesome comedy-horror series about dangerous freaks from a remote village. Psychoville is a slight departure: it's a gruesome comedy-horror series about dangerous freaks from all over the country.

Among them are a midwife (Dawn French) who looks after a doll as if it were a real baby, a one-handed clown (Shearsmith) who bullies children, and a man (Pemberton) whose obsession with historical murders is exceeded in creepiness only by his uncommonly close relationship with his mother.

In its less queasy moments this first episode was fairly funny. Although casting directors prefer to give us Dawn French as a cuddlesome yokel, she's so much better as a seething nutcase - remember Murder Most Horrid. Print probably won't do justice to the menace she gave the final line in this exchange:

Midwife: "This bit at the top of the baby's head is called the soft spot."

Woman: "You mean the fontanelle."

Midwife: "What's that, Miriam?"

Woman: "My name's Kate."

Midwife: "Oh I'm sorry, I thought you were DOCTOR MIRIAM STOPPARD."

Psychoville isn't some chortling spoof of the horror genre; it genuinely is eerie. Then again, perhaps "horror" is the wrong word. The worry is not that you're about to see something scary, but that you're about to see something revolting. Inventively revolting. You want to turn over before something hideous happens, but you want to keep watching to find out what it is - and at least you rest safe in the knowledge that Krod Mandoon is already behind you in the night's schedule.

As openings go, Psychoville's was near perfect. A quill scratched over paper, a guttering candle flickered in the darkness. Then suddenly all was light. The candle was on a post office counter. A figure shrouded in black swept out, and a stout lady in the queue pursed her lips. "'E's left his candle," she said to another lady.

The slick genius of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's new comedy was that it didn't feel like the first episode of anything: indeed its gallery of grotesques seemed immediately very familiar. Were they benefiting from our foreknowledge of their previous opus, The League of Gentlemen? Here too are a monstrous set of characters, ghouls made flesh and plonked in the everyday, and they are all linked (as yet we don't know how) by a letter each receives which reads menacingly that the sender knows what he or she did.

Dawn French as the deranged ante-natal nurse who treats her doll baby as if it was real was particularly compelling. The scary children's entertainer, Mr Jelly, comes with a hook hand and is terrifying. He's not, he says emphatically, Mr Jolly and scares a group of children into screaming fear. When the parents nervously inquire if he really is a children's entertainer, he growls, "No, I'm Harold Shipman." In a production of Snow White, a dwarf actor falls for the leading lady and receives the benevolent counsel of the leading man, without realising that they spend their downtime laughing at him in the porn video he once made. But he has a rather violent capacity for telekinesis...

In a gloomy mansion, a shadowy figure called Mr Lomax intrigues "Tealeaf", the young man sent round to help him. The strangest relationship is between a mother and son, incestuously attracted to each other (she scrapes his back and tucks him in just a second too long), which is quite dark enough without the delicious twist that he seems to be ready to start acting out his obsession with serial killers.

Pemberton and Shearsmith's characters hum with a deranged vitality. The humour is dark, irreverent and vicious - yet warm and affectionate too. The characters are freaks, but we care about them. The mysterious figure in black reminds me of the Phantom Flan Flinger in Tiswas.

Since Royston Vasey closed its doors to business in 2002, the assorted League Of Gentlemen have scarcely set the world on fire. I don't know about you but I expected a bit more from the black-hearted crazy gang than cameos in the likes of Poirot and Benidorm. But at least two of them are back on form for now we have Psychoville (BBC2), a delirious wander back into the Gothic universe of Papa Lazarou et al.

The infected brainchild of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, Psychoville features a psychic porn dwarf, a scabrous one-handed children's clown called Mr Jelly, Dawn French doing penance for The Vicar Of Dibley as a demented midwife and much besides, all wrapped up in a cloak of blood-spattered menace that would do Edgar Allan Poe proud. The story thus far is not the point; episode one was all about soaking us in nutjob atmosphere.

As the coterie of oddballs each received a twirly-scripted anonymous note bearing the legend 'I Know What You Did' it was clear it was going to take a while for this plot to thicken, but there were more than enough gruesome diversions going on to galvanise the attention. I was particularly taken by much-too-close-for-comfort mother and son Maureen and David Sowerbutts, especially when she took far too long sorting out his fly. Who hasn't had a moment like that? Oh, that's just me then.

The Sowerbutts also got the best potential catchphrases, essential when students get round to re-enacting scenes. David's 'Sorry, Mum, I did a bad murder' is a definite contender. But better still was the even more disturbing 'Come and give your mummy a kiss'.

I've got Psychoville to entertain me, and it's sure as hell going to do that. The first episode was mesmerising, made up of lots of little stories that (I'm guessing) are soon linked together. There's the jealous dwarf, obsessed with taking Snow White out for a date; the one-handed clown whose act consists primarily of fixing novelty hands to his stump (he was my favourite), and the incestuous, serial-killer-obsessed mother and son. A chirpy bunch. Every time it flitted between them I'd be disappointed because I'd been engrossed, only to find myself just as fascinated by what followed. Except for the incestuous mother and son, that was a bit much, especially when she starts scratching the dry skin from his back. But apart from that, it was great. Creepy, but great. Indeed, the only problem I can foresee is the inevitable smugness it'll inspire in The League of Gentlemen lovers. I failed to cotton on to that one, which apparently - or at least according to the boyfriend - relegates me to some sort of lower order of TV viewer. Psychoville is from the same writers, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, and bares more than a few similarities, which meant much of the programme was spent straining to hear over said boyfriend's regular outbursts of ohmygodthat's-justlikeleagueofgentlemen. Not to worry, I'll lock him out next time.

Another oddity from the minds of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the pair who blessed us with The League Of Gentlemen. This time we're spookily flitting between a group of characters that includes a deranged serial killer fanatic, a deranged midwife, a deranged millionaire and - are you spotting a theme? - a deranged clown whose lives seem to be linked by a blackmail letter. As you might expect, this series opener is dark, macabre and gross in places but it does have an intriguing narrative thread. Plus Dawn French is in it - always a good thing.

It's hard to know at what exact point in the opening episode of Psychoville, the new comedy/horror/thriller from the guys who made the similarly indescribable The League of Gentlemen, it becomes clear you're not watching My Family. But I'd guess the scene where a mother sits on a bed, legs intimately splayed around her challenged son, casually scratching the excess skin off his back while reading aloud a book about serial killers, is the one that would do it. The less said about their lingering kiss goodbye, and another moment I'd rather not describe, the better.

So it's clear, then, we're back in that The League of Gentleman high-wire act of very funny and very, very disturbing. Perhaps surprisingly, however, creators Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, had initially set out to write "a standard sitcom". It didn't work out that way.

"We'd heard people weren't in the market for dark comedy any more -it wasn't something they (the BBC) were looking for, but there's no point them saying to people who are unique and original: 'We like what you do, but we'd like it to be more like Gavin and Stacey.' Thankfully, the BBC understood."

For Psychoville, they ended up setting themselves a unique challenge. They wanted to "mash a comedy with a thriller or a mystery like those big American shows where you just have to watch every episode". Certainly, the first episode leaves you wanting more.

Did they feel anything - I'm thinking the ­back-scratching scene - might have been a little too disturbing? "Ha ha, actually," says Pemberton, "it could have been worse. It came from a story of someone we knew who walked in on a friend who was having their back scratched by their mother, and the mother had only one leg, and she was using her foot to scratch it. But I thought no one would believe that. The truth is we had to tone it down."

To be fair, the tone is rarely gross-out - the overall atmosphere is more chilling than disgusting, and the first ­episode ends with perhaps the most disturbing scene of SPOILER REMOVED.

"People are going to ­compare it with The League of Gentlemen and describe it as dark, and we'll have to live with that," says Pemberton. "But we just wanted to write a good story. And the rest is just what we're drawn to, I guess."

Message from Reece Shearsmith

Reece Shearsmith talks about the first broadcast of Psychoville.