Psychoville

Psychoville is the brainchild of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith who are most famous for their "League of Gentlemen" series that was popular on BBC 2. Renowned for their grotesque characters this series was originally screened on BBC2 earlier this year and I have just got round to watching it thanks to my online DVD rental company sending me the discs. The story follows a group of people all linked to a specific act that took place a couple of years ago, they each start receiving anonymous notes through the post that simply say "I know what you did" and as the episodes progress they end up being back together having being manipulated ...  Read the complete review

Psychoville is quite simply a genius work of comedy, written by two of the writers from League of Gentlemen - Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. It is initially a sketch type show, starring many characters whose lives become increasingly intertwined as the series progresses. The characters include Mr Jelly (my favourite) - a clown displaying psychotic tendencies, Joy (Dawn French) - a midwife who has a doll which she believes is alive and treats as such, and also Robert - a panto dwarf in love with his real Snow White. The comedy is very dark and quite subtle, rather than your more obvious slapstick. As the series progresses, the plot becomes more central ...  Read the complete review

After the ground breaking success of the League of Gentlemen I was expecting great things from Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, two of the surrealistic masterminds behind the timeless dark comedy, and I pleased to say that they didn't disappoint. Psychoville is a dark comedy/thriller that follows the slightly nightmarish lives of five British residents, all in various stages of virulent insanity. There's a brutally straight forward nurse (Joy Aston), who's under the increasingly hysterical belief that her maternity doll is actually alive, a visually impaired millionaire with an alarming obsession for beanie babies (Oscar Lomax), a love struck pantomime ...  Read the complete review

This was a BBC 2 series written and directed by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who were partly responsible for the epic series The League of Gentlemen. This series had similarities to The League of Gentlemen, especially the style of dark, black comedy although Psychoville was ever so slightly more upbeat/comical. The series revolves around five different characters : David Sowerbutts (Pemberton)who is a serial killer obsessed man who still lives with his mother Maureen (Shearsmith). Maureen very much controls David, treating him like a child (he in turn acts like a child) and occassionally the relationship crosses over into something that makes ...  Read the complete review

I don't quite see how a team of comedy writers as talented as the guys behind the long, lamented TV series 'The League of Gentlemen' can have gone from the likes of the sublimely-scipted 'yes, Mrs Levinson' routines to, well, the gratuitously grotesque, cliche-ridden tat I saw last week featured in the BBC2 series 'Psychoville'. Have the people responsible for this been taking their lead from the bafflingly successful TV series 'Little Britain' - which itself was a blatant, unnecessarily cruel rip-off of the 'League of Gentlemen' series? The inexcusably awful 'Little Britian' featured a cast of 'comedy grotesque' characters who were subjected to ...  Read the complete review