Go johnny go go go go (The Complete League Of Gentlemen (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Complete League Of Gentlemen (DVD)
Date:	19/12/05 (319 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great recent comedy show

Disadvantages: Season 3 not as funny as the others

The League of Gentlemen, a kind of cross between a sitcom and a sketch show, first appeared in 1999. There were three series and one Christmas special, all of which are collected here. Since then they’ve made a film (which I haven’t seen yet), and it may be that they aren’t going to do any more TV shows.

Before they were on the TV, they did a great radio series, and before that they were an acclaimed live act, doing well at the Edinburgh Festival, and wherever else it is that live comedy does well. The series is set in the (fictional) small northern town of Royston Vasey, and concerns the extensive cast of weirdos, freaks and psychopaths who live there. All the main characters, and there are dozens, are played by the same three people: Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who also write the show along with Jeremy Dyson, who doesn’t act.

It’s a bit like the Fast Show, in that it’s essentially a series of sketches featuring recurring characters, except that almost all of them have ongoing storylines. The best-known are probably Edward and Tubbs, in-bred local shopkeepers with a murderous dislike of strangers. Other major characters include Uncle Harvey and Auntie Val, the hygiene-obsessed toad breeders; ghastly lesbian unemployment restart officer Pauline, and the spectacularly inept vet Dr Chinnery. My favourites are Pop, a repulsive Greek newsagent/slum landlord; Hilary Briss, a sinister butcher; and Papa Lazarou, a terrifying circus owner and kidnapper.

I find it almost impossible to explain humour properly, and probably won’t have much success here (‘…because you see, vets are supposed to *help* animals, but this one always accidentally *kills* them. Ha ha’). Some of the humour is fairly traditional, even old fashioned (silly voices, slapstick, men dressed as women etc). Some of it is reasonably ordinary post-Python surrealism (various sight gags around the town, for instance). Not all the gags are stunningly original – there’s a complicated card game sketch that’s very similar to a scene in a Tom Stoppard play, and the camp German Herr Lipp could easily have appeared in Allo Allo – but even when they’re not being original, they’re still usually very funny, so it doesn’t matter.

There’s also a pretty dark strain to it all, which is probably why I like it so much (and some of it really is very nasty indeed). The series seems to try to capture a small-town bleakness, and nails the horror of living life without meaning better than any other comedy outside of Alan Partridge. It’s also very rooted in Northern English traditions (all the League are from Yorkshire), with specific piss-takes of things like Kes or All Creatures Great and Small, taking the beloved idea of the North as being full of jaunty characters wilfully ignoring their miserable surroundings, and putting wilfully perverse twists on it. (Not that the North of England is really that bad – the bits I’ve been to have all been rather nice – but there does seem to be a mini-industry in the British media – which of course is based in London – of having quirky northerners rising above their grim circumstances through their lovable, working class eccentricity. It’s this that the League are taking the mickey out of, I think.)

Best of all, and the reason I love it so much, is the fact that it references old horror films like mad. The League are all big horror fans, and they’ve tapped into the vein of dark and deeply weird humour that runs through the best horror movies. And there are stacks of references for the attentive horror fan to pick up on. Some are very obvious (The Shining, Don’t Look Now), others are more obscure (is Papa Lazarou’s three-legged dog a nod to the obscure British video nasty Killer’s Moon? I like to think so…). Shopkeeper Edward is essentially Lon Chaney’s Phantom with Christopher Lee’s Dracula wig, and one whole scene is pretty much lifted verbatim from The Wicker Man. The series was very successful, so presumably the wealth of references doesn’t alienate people who aren’t as obsessive about horror movies as I am, but I love that they’ve put them in.

The series is beautifully shot, obviously aspiring to look cinematic, and succeeding. Every episode was directed by the same guy (Steve Bendelack), so there’s a real sense of continuity. The music is great, too. The three main cast members are fantastic, grotesque comic actors, and the make-up is fantastic. There are various celebrity cameo appearances, increasingly so as the series became more successful, including Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown (real name Royston Vasey) and a pre-Who Christopher Ecclestone, but they all fit pretty well.

So there are three series. The first is probably the most consistent, introducing the best characters. The second series also has some wonderful stuff, and a great ongoing storyline about an epidemic of nosebleeds. Its main weakness is that it does feel like some characters were shoe-horned in because they were popular – Harvey and Val and Edward and Tubbs don’t really have much to do. The Christmas Special is a parody of old Amicus anthology horror movies, as well as a nod to the BBC’s old Christmas ghost stories. It’s great for horror movie reference spotting, and generally good, but it does feel slightly overlong, as if a few minutes could easily have been chopped from each story. The third season didn’t go down nearly as well with the public, each episode focusing on one character rather than the sketch-show approach of earlier series. It also had far fewer actual jokes, was a lot darker, and abandoned the canned laughter of the earlier series. I actually think it’s pretty good for the most part, although the new characters they introduced aren’t generally as good as the old ones. It’s certainly better than people tend to give it credit for, especially on a second viewing.

The set is laden with extras (there are two disks full of them). For each series there’s an image gallery of characters (rather pointless) and various out-takes and deleted scenes. Seasons two and three have reasonable making-of documentaries.
The Christmas special has a strange little featurette where horror film critic Jonathan Rigby talks to the League about their favourite old horror anthology movies (it includes clips of some endearingly awful home movie horror they made before they were famous). It also has a nice little jackanory pastiche, where Mark Gatiss reads out one of the stories from the special. There are various other interviews and video diaries in the set, although after a while you do start to suffer a bit from information overload.

The best special features are the commentaries. Each series, and the special, have full commentaries from all the League (the director joins them for the first series). These are genuinely worth watching, as they’re entertaining and tell you a lot beyond the usual where-we-filmed-this-bit stuff. They talk about where their ideas came from, and complain about various supporting cast members. They also talk a lot about horror films. The main criticism is that they seem to think the audience is too thick to spot all the gags, or understand the plots, so tend to explain them rather laboriously (Jeremy Dyson is especially guilty of this). But on the whole the commentaries actually add to my enjoyment of the shows, and there aren’t many other commentaries I can say that about.

I think this is probably my favourite TV comedy since Brass Eye. I certainly can’t explain why it’s so funny – you just have to watch it, and you’ll either like the humour or you won’t. (Basically – you know that bit in the Masque of the Red Death where Patrick Magee, dressed as a gorilla, gets hoisted up on a rope by a dwarf who then sets him on fire? Well if you think that’s one of the funniest things ever then you’ll probably enjoy League of Gentlemen. If you don’t then you may not.) This box set is the same as the previous individual season releases, so if you’ve got them then this adds nothing at all. If you haven’t, then it’s an easy way to get the whole lot in one go. It’s supposed to be £40, but you should be able to get it for at least £10 less than that.

Summary: A good collection of all the League's TV work with great extras