The League of Gentlemen have brought their 'strange, insecty and gargoyley' ways to the streets of Dublin for the filming of their first feature. Donald Clarke risks a conversation with them
I can't remember the last time I saw a bewigged 17th-century fop in Cabra, but I'm looking at one now. It is Mark Gatiss of the gothic comic troupe, The League of Gentlemen, and he is making his way towards a large, cylindrical wooden structure, within which the inimitable David Warner, cloaked and bearded, is confronting the other Gentlemen.
Director Steve Bendelack is describing the sound effects that will later be added in.
"Strange, insecty, gargoyley noises," he bellows. "And action!"
All in all, this is pretty much the sort of thing I had expected to see on the set of the chaps' first film. Since emerging from the slime in the early 1990s, The League of Gentlemen have managed the tricky business of mashing together a myriad of grimy influences - Hammer Horror, kitchen-sink drama, Carry On films - without ever straying into cool, clever-clogs homage. They are all the things that made them, but they are themselves first. From their beginnings in fringe theatre, through a BBC Radio 4 incarnation to their triumphant TV show, they have stayed strange, insecty and gargoyley.
The four members of the League - Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Jeremy Dyson, and Reece Shearsmith - met while at drama school near Leeds. League fans (numerous, fanatical and prone to the setting up of websites) have already established a series of legends about their heroes. It is said that serious bonding occurred during a conversation in which they realised that they had all watched the same Hallowe'en broadcast of Carry On Screaming in, they now guess, 1976 or so.
"I think it just started as a conversation about how we remembered Bonfire Night when we were little," Gatiss says. "The smell of turnips and, maybe, being late for a fireworks display because we were watching this film. But that conversation was the start of learning all the cultural baggage that came with knowing one another."
That cultural baggage - the stuff they sucked in from British TV during the grim 1970s - is a crucial element of the League's unique comic milieu. Hideous characters, such as the homicidal owners of The Local Shop, or Mr Briss, the butcher who sells "special stuff", inhabit an era with no mobile phones, hip-hop or boot-cut jeans. And, for TV viewers of an age to remember The Singing Ringing Tree and The Tomorrow People, Royston Vasey, the bleak town where the show takes place, inspires as much nostalgia as dread.
"There is no more satisfying vindication than this movie for all those times we were told: 'Get off your bloody arse, stop watching telly and do something,' " Dyson laughs. "I remember there was a friend of mine who, rather tragically, bought into the whole school thing of working hard. He went to Oxford and everything. I remember him saying, in a melancholy way: 'I used to think you were wasting your time on comics and videos - and now you're a success.' Rather sad."
The gentlemen are extraordinarily cheery and friendly fellows. Gattis, the tall one, is the most analytical. Shearsmith, the handsome one, is the most cautious. Pemberton, the chubby one, comes across like a visiting academic. Dyson, the one who writes but doesn't act, is keen and self- deprecating.
"Yes, journalists always say they are surprised that we are not more grotesque," Pemberton, sitting in his trailer listening to Michael Nyman, muses.
Having come together around their shared devotion to all things unsettling, the four northerners decided to turn their impromptu improvisations into a stage show. The League of Gentlemen first appeared at London's Cockpit Theatre in 1994 but didn't really hit their stride until the following year when they booked themselves into a nearby venue, the Canal Café Theatre, for a weekly slot. Interestingly, almost all the characters who would become so popular five years later appeared in that early show. As they toured the country, others emerged.
"We were between live shows in Brighton," Shearsmith says. "And we were told Rottingdean down the road was a pretty place to visit. So we went into this shop and discovered this old lady. She was so petrified of us it was actually quite annoying. It's not like we are the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But she was convinced we were stealing. Or worse." Tubbs, the lactating proprietor of The Local Shop, who, in tandem with her more confident but no less psychotic husband, butchers any hiker foolish enough to ask for a can of Coke ("Can, I can't?"), was born.
I suggest to Gatiss that the original shop might, like Torquay's Gleneagles Hotel, the inspiration for Fawlty Towers, become a comedy landmark.
"Perhaps," he says. "We went back trying to find it and it seemed to have vanished - like in Brigadoon. This nice woman came up to us looking for our autograph and she said: 'Are you looking for The Local Shop?' And she showed us where it actually was. We went in and the woman was still in there with her friend. We were able to do a few lines from the sketch."
The Local Shop really sums up the team's equivocal view of the England of 30 years ago.
"We grew up in the Winter of Discontent," Gatiss explains. "And you just got used to being told that Britain was totally f**ked. It was dark, sooty, and everything was dirty. We are celebrating those days when you would go to a shop and there would be cardboard boxes weeping with damp. Broken biscuits."
The Great Leap Forward for the early League came when they won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1997.
"That changed everything," Dyson says. "Up until then I thought the appeal of the show would be very limited."
Shortly afterwards the troupe were rewarded with a show on BBC Radio 4 and then, in 1999, the first of three TV series. In an era when cults are often cynically manufactured, The League of Gentlemen is the real thing: the show may not be to everybody's taste, but if you like it a little, you probably like it a lot.
I ask David Warner, the star of Straw Dogs, Time Bandits, and a dozen other League favourites, to muse upon the team's appeal.
"I met them socially and they were awfully nice and asked if I would like to be in a film if they ever did one, and I said: 'Oh yes,' " he says. "I call them the Alec Guinness Brothers. I watched the series and realised that all the characters had full histories. With Monty Python, brilliant as they were, you always knew it was Eric Idle or Graham Chapman. Here they become completely absorbed into the characters. They are real actors, these guys, and I talk as an actor myself. And wonderful guys."
CONSIDERING THE BREADTH of the boys' imaginations, it seems appropriate that they should expand into film. The League of Gentlemen: Royston Vasey (as the movie is currently known) is based on the idea that the inhabitants of that grim spot, having discovered that their creators have decided to cease writing about them, head into the real world to stop themselves fading into oblivion. It turns oput that The League - all playing themselves except Dyson who, maintaining his anonymity, is represented by Michael Sheen - have turned their attention to a period drama starring, yes, David Warner.
"It was such a pleasure to have David in this and repay him for all our yesterdays," Gatiss says. "We have great stop-motion monsters climbing up to the top of buildings here. This is all our childhood enthusiasms being acted out. But somebody asked me how we were going to make it look more cinematic than the series and I said we were going to make it look like cheap television. But actually it looks rather grand."
It probably doesn't need to be said that this most English of projects finds itself shooting in Dublin's Northside largely for financial reasons. And our own Hell's Kitchen Productions has built upon the relationship it developed with the British company, Tiger Aspect, while making Pete Travis's Omagh, to put together what looks like a smooth, efficient operation. What is perhaps more surprising is that a film originating from a BBC TV series has ended up being partly financed by what remains of Film Four, once Channel 4's film division, with no involvement from the Beeb at all.
"That is typical BBC," Dyson says. "It is not odd when you know anything about the BBC. Jon Plowman, our executive producer, very much wanted the BBC to be involved, but the film wing has no connection with the television wing. So there was nothing that one could do to influence the other. It's a mystery that I can't really talk about. But it certainly is not because we didn't want them to be involved."
All four of the main players have found themselves drifting into non-Gentleman projects over the last few years. Pemberton played Harry Secombe in the recent Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Shearsmith appeared in the sitcom, Spaced, and Dyson has written for Reeves and Mortimer's updating of the 1970s show, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).
But Gatiss has been by far the busiest. As well as a number of supporting roles in films and TV shows, the tall one has written an episode of the upcoming revival of Dr Who, starring Christopher Eccleston and has, this month, published a comic adventure novel, The Vesuvius Club. But they all still regard The League of Gentlemen as family.
"It is like Monty Python - that remains the great model," Dyson says. "There was something rather nice about the way they kept coming back together after doing other things. And if it remains as much fun as this is, you can be sure we'll keep coming back to the League."