The League of Gentlemen

“Hello, Dave!”


I’m sitting in my Year 11 maths class. An unfortunate looking teacher walks through the door. This is the cry that greets her. It’s so ridiculous and random that it can't hurt her – it’s a non sequitur forged in surrealism, made from nonsense. My friends around me laugh because they know where it’s from. I laugh because of the incongruity: a colourful outburst in a a grey classroom. I don’t know where the reference is from or what it means. It’s taken me 15 years to understand what I laughed at that day.

The League of Gentleman was on my friends radar for years. Out of my schoolmates, Ian, Dec and Coxy were huge fans. At university Jim had the VHS on the rack (him and Phil would often quote lines from it). Even though I admired this league of gentlemen and their comic sensibilities, I never felt compelled to watch. I’d seen the front cover and assumed it wasn’t for me. I was always of a mainstream disposition. During school my favourite comedies were Friends and Only Fools and Horses, comfort sitcoms that celebrated friendship and family. Even though my tastes would change, taking in more obscure fare like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Nathan Barley, I never felt the urge to visit The League...

The League of Gentlemen is a long way from Friends.

I think my indifference to The League... was down to two factors: one its sketch show format; the other its characters. As far as I was concerned The League was a revolving door of grotesqueries, demonstrating no through-line or continuity. The thing I love about sitcom is it has a depth sketch can't achieve. Great sitcom is about more than laughs. Our great comedy characters are imbued with a tragedy that increases over time. In the first few episodes these creations initially appear monstrous, failing quite spectacularly in the business of civilisation. After a series though their humanity unfurls so you no longer see beast, but human. Fawlty, Brent and Partridge aren’t so different to you or me: they’re confused by the world and resentful they’re not doing well in it. (If you’ve never felt this way, you’re a liar.) So The League of Gentlemen seemed like a sketch show for sketch show people. I wasn’t welcome there. For me, sitcom was a Sistine Chapel, an artistic wonder celebrating theme and character. The sketch show- conversely- a child’s painting, a slapdash slather of caricature. 

When it comes to The League …, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

This week I watched The League of Gentlemen Anniversary Specials – and loved it. Given I’m already a fan of the individual members work, I don’t know what took me so long. I’ve enjoyed Mark Gatiss’ modern re-working of Sherlock, looked forward to Jeremy Dyson’s Ghost Stories and marvelled over the ingenuity of Shearsmith’s and Pemberton’s Inside Number Nine.  Stupidly, I’ve watched the solo projects before the thing that made the group famous. It’s a bit like listening to Niall Horan’s ‘Too Much To Ask’ and not being aware of One Direction’s oeuvre- well, only a bit like that.

They're visionary solo artists. I imagine the band was pretty great too.

The League of Gentlemen is a sketch show, and yet isn’t one as well. It’s a sketch show in a sense that characters come in and out of view, rarely crisscross with one another and enjoy a catchphrase or two. It isn’t a sketch show in the sense that these nightmarish cartoons develop into three-dimensional personalities capable of growth. For most sketch shows, continuity is the key; it allows the viewer to anticipate what’s coming next- and be satisfied when it does. However, in The League of Gentlemen there is a greater emphasis on characterisation, which means the character comes before the catchphrase.

The first episode in the comeback opens with a callback to the first ever episode (I’ve since watched the first series). There are further nods to the past with a ‘Lost’ poster being particularly redolent. For first timers like me though, there is much to enjoy. The sight gags at the start are inspired, with shop signs lamenting, ‘Bra Shop: Gone Bust,’ ‘Sam’s Soup: Stock Reduced’ and ‘Tyres: Everything Slashed.’ These puns are in the great British tradition of gag writing, but they also hold contemporary relevance: this is Broken Britain, a town The Big Society forgot. Later, we see townspeople queuing up at an ATM ‘Food Bank’ for their processed cheese and spam. The creators of The League … said their show was never political, but it feels that way now.

Episode 1 of the original. Episode 1 of the anniversary special.

After we back in the taxi with Barbara, who in the first series was going through the process of gender reassignment. Twenty years ago, her character was played for husky voiced laughs. Now with transsexual rights in the media, she’s been repositioned as a strong heroine. With Benjamin taking the same cab journey he took in the first series, he gets into a conversation with Barbara about the preferred pronoun (he/she). Barbara’s response:  ‘Well if you don’t know, you can piss off out of here, I’m not telling you.’ Although the Royston Vasey asylum hasn’t changed, the creators have; their worldview brings the show kicking and screaming into the twenty first century.

Contemporary relevance is shown further by the main plot-line of the series. What makes The League of Gentlemen so unique is that it imposed narrative on the form. Previously the sketch form had no unity; it was rooted in chaos. The League’s first series had the story of a proposed road linking Royston with its neighbours; so although the characters didn’t leave their small world of shop, pub and job centre, they shared an overarching concern. In this series it’s the boundary line that’s concerning residence. 

Royston’s crime figures are too high, as a result authorities want it subsumed, removed from history. Tubbs and Edward, the local shopkeepers, are the type of people that make today’s Leave voters look like Gina Miller. Their characters are so shut off from the outside world, they perceive the step to their shop foreign – worse, un-local. In our post-Brexit world of insularity, they’re the final Russian Doll: they don’t care about the nation, they care only for the town. So when they hear of how Whitehall Nazis plan to annex their land, they cry foul play and promise to ‘take back control.’ In a recent interview with The Radio Times, Steve Coogan, a Remain voter, confessed he had his doubts over giving his character, Alan Partridge, airtime. Partridge’s closed-bordered view of Britain has now become a reality, so wouldn’t there be a danger that viewers would think that was his creator’s views? Coogan argued that the best way to ridicule Brexit was to have an idiot speak effusively about it. You get the feeling The League…, in Tubbs and Edward, have done the same. Brains will be spilt as the rebel army defend their homeland, but they’ll also be stroked as viewers appreciate the satirical overtones.

The Gove and Farge of Royson Vasey.

Since watching the three anniversary episodes, I’ve gone back to the beginning and started watching from the series one. It’s a wonderful feeling when you discover something new, yet realise how old it is. It means there’s the series, film and maybe even next year’s tour show to catch up on.

It would have been nice all those years ago to have understood what my mates were laughing about in maths. But there’s no points having regrets. After all when it comes to classic comedy, ‘you can’t go back, but you can visit.'

The League of Gentlemen Anniversary Specials are available on iPlayer.