How we made The League of Gentlemen

Stephen Pemberton, writer/actor

We were doing our first stage shows in 1995 and decided to stop off at Rottingdean on our way to a gig in Brighton; there was a wishing stone in a churchyard that Mark [Gatiss] wanted to find. When we got there we each made a wish – essentially that this endeavour we had started would bear fruit – and on our way back we stopped off at this little shop. All four of us went in and the woman who worked there looked aghast, as if thinking: “My God, I’m going to be mugged and raped! You’re going to steal everything!” We walked out and burst into laughter. Reece [Shearsmith] came up with The Local Shop and that was the birth of those characters.

In 1986, I started at Bretton Hall College in Yorkshire, where I met Mark and Reece. I come from a background where nobody’s ever been to university, or to the theatre; there was no experience of performing other than that general banter that a lot of northern families have – so I had no expectations. In a way, the League was railing against that very safe, cosy light-entertainment world; we loved the writing of Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood and the Saturday-night double bill of horror films. We brought that ear for dialogue and love of gothic horror together.

We were left alone to write what we wanted but while we were looking for locations for the first series our producer kept stepping away to take phone calls: we learned later that the show was on the brink of being cancelled as the controller of BBC2 just didn’t get it. Thankfully as soon as the show hit the airwaves it was an instant success.

The costumes were murder – if you needed to go to the toilet it became a huge thing. As the series went on, the body suit for Tubbs would be fetched out of the loft and you could see bits of mould growing on it. When we finished the last series, I remember kicking the padding around the corridor saying: “I’m never ever getting into that again.”

I turned 30 the year we won the Perrier award. I always said: “When I’m 30, if I haven’t done anything yet I’ll knock it on the head and do something else.” So thank God! I could have ended up doing a Legs Akimbo-style theatre company. I could be Olly Plimsolls right now.

Jeremy Dyson, writer

I was badgered into meeting Mark by my old friend Gordon [Anderson, who co-founded 606 Theatre with Stephen]. He was so insistent, it was as if he was trying to fix us up. I resisted at first, but when we did meet eventually it was love at first sight – creatively speaking.

Around the time we were doing the first stage show, Steve Coogan’s Paul and Pauline Calf video diary came out and I remember Mark ringing me saying: “We’ve missed the boat!” We were always aiming for television. We were very confident – horrendously so – because we had such a clear idea of what we wanted to do. It must have been a nightmare for production teams.

After we did Edinburgh we got a BBC Radio 4 series and BBC2 pilot, and we spent three days in a Brighton B&B working up an incredibly detailed document about the League town. There was a clothes shop called Bang Bangs and a long list of names for the town; Royston Vasey was one. It was Chubby Brown’s real name and that just made us laugh.

There was a line in one of the stage reviews I always cherished that said League of Gentleman was “barely on nodding terms with conventional comedy” and I used to carry that around like a badge. Jonathan Miller [theatre director] said that for him the definition of the funniest comedy is a private joke made public. That’s the Goons, that’s Python, that’s Vic Reeves: there’s something about buying into part of something tribal, and I guess the League had that. We were a gang.

I don’t seek out the League to watch now, but occasionally I’ll catch a bit and I’m sometimes quite shocked! That something so strange somehow found an audience on the scale it did was always the thing that amazed us all.