Psychoville thrills

22/06/2009

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton reveal the Gentlemen aren't finished yet

By Laura Kelly

As each of the gallery of grotesques that make up the cast of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s new series, Psychoville, are revealed, it becomes increasingly clear that the duo – who made up one half of The League of Gentlemen – didn’t listen to the BBC when the broadcasters said they now wanted all their comedy to be “big and funny”, rather than dark and unnerving. 

From the mother testing her son’s knowledge about serial killers as she scratches the psoriasis on his back, to the psychotic clown with one hand who slowly terrifies the guests at a kids’ party and the midwife who treats her creepy plastic demonstration doll like a real baby, the freaks and oddballs have the clammy fingerprints of The League… all over them. 

That said, when the pair speak to The Big Issue they are at great pains to point out that this is not just a fourth series of the Royston Vasey-set horror comedy that they created with Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson. 

“We knew the comparisons would be there,” says Pemberton, “there’s no getting away from that, but we’ve done as much as we can to make it feel like it’s not just another series of the same thing. It is its own show and for us I think it’s a step on. It feels more mature.
 
“It’s the same kind of sensibility and the same sense of humour but I think there’s something about it that feels like an evolution.”

Taking on a heavy dose of Hitchcock, the “evolution” sees the former League members leave the sketch-like format behind and take on a much more cohesive thriller storyline. They’ve even cut back on the number of parts they’re playing to allow other actors on-set – including Dawn French, Adrian Scarborough and Christopher Biggins. 

The series begins with five seemingly-unconnected characters – the aforementioned clown, serial-killer obsessed son and midwife plus a blind recluse with a bizarre collection, and a dwarf with telekinetic powers – all receiving a black-edged card bearing an ominous message: “I know what you did”.
 
Then it’s cliffhangers aplenty as the terrible secrets are revealed. Shearsmith says that the idea for the tense comedy mystery came from watching US series like 24, Heroes and Lost, in which you can’t afford to miss an episode or you’ll get left behind. Dexter – the hit show about a serial killer who only murders other killers, which has some of the same squirmy quality and amorality that marked out The League…– was a particular influence.

“I’m constantly finding myself horrified that I’m siding with Dexter,” adds Shearsmith. “It’s great that I’m tussling with my morals. In the same way, there are characters in Psychoville that you feel you shouldn’t be rooting for but you are. That’ll be great when people actually care about David [the psoriasis-suffering Jack the Ripper fan] and what’s going to happen to him even though he’s done these terrible things.”

“My mum’s quite into Dexter,” Pemberton pipes up, “which is quite unusual because she’s quite a normal TV viewer – she likes Coronation Street, but she absolutely loves Dexter. “I was talking to her about it and she said, ‘I like it because it’s light-hearted’. What?! 

“What I think she means is she likes the fact that there’s humour in it – it’s telling you this horrific story but there’s humour in it. 

“I hope she finds Psychoville similarly light-hearted.” As the creators of Dexter must do, Pemberton and Shearsmith are constantly weighing up how far they can push their characters and retain our empathy. Nonetheless, the show has some fairly uncomfortable moments, not least the strong hints at incest between David and his mum Maureen. When horror is your bread and butter, how far is too far?

“Definitely there would be things we would consider too far and we wouldn’t put them in,” says Pemberton. “To take the example of the scene with David and Maureen – when we wrote that we didn’t necessarily have it in mind that it would be as disturbing as it turned out.

“The script said, ‘He kisses her goodbye’. It didn’t say, ‘There is a long, lingering 13-second kiss on the lips’. But then, we were creating this situation where the mother is testing her son on serial killers while scratching his back – there is something very wrong in their relationship already.” 

Although they debated for hours about whether there should be a double bed or twin beds in the background of David and Maureen’s scene – “we eventually went for single beds, because perversely it seemed worse” – Pemberton isn’t about to apologise for creeping you out. “There are some things on the edge, certainly, and there are some things that are very chilling and very nightmarish – and that’s exactly the reaction we want.”

“We’ve never set out to be mainstream,” agrees Shearsmith. “I don’t think we could be. It’s a very strong flavour that we have. But we feel like we’re well respected and cherished and we’re delighted to have this second show to prove we’re not just one-trick ponies.”

Fans of that first trick shouldn’t despair, however. Although he’d love to do another series of Psychoville if they’re “allowed”, Shearsmith says they definitely haven’t drawn a line under The League of Gentlemen. Papa Lazarou, Tubbs and Herr Lipp may yet rise up for a fourth series. 

“We never split up,” he says of the original team, who first bonded at Leeds University over a shared love of The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now. “The League as a group is still ongoing. We’ve not fallen out at all. There’s no reason why we wouldn’t do something again but there’d have to be a good reason why we would.”

For the moment, Pemberton and Shearsmith have earned a little rest. Both in their early 40s and with young children to look after, they insist that their home life is as ordinary as their programmes are strange. Thankfully for the residents of the north London neighbourhood where they both live, few people associate them with their terrifying creations in the way that many mix Kiefer Sutherland up with Jack Bauer or Michael C Hall with Dexter. 

The pair can apparently drink their frequent cups of coffee in peace. “We don’t go on the big chatshows and stuff like that,” says Pemberton, “because people don’t quite know who we are.” 

Psychoville is on Thursdays, 10pm, on BBC Two