Mark Gatiss Mark Lawson Talks To...

Mark Gatiss was first picked out among a quartet

that looked like dozens of people.

The comedy horror outfit, The League of Gentlemen,

seen in TV, stage and film versions,

which he formed with drama school classmates,

Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson.

On his own, Gatiss has written novels,

acted and written for Doctor Who,

played biographical cameos in movies,

including University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne, in Starter For 10,

and co-created with Steven Moffat, and appeared in,

the modern extension to 221B Baker Street, Sherlock.

Your career looks unusually neat

because the things you were interested in in childhood,

Doctor Who, horror, Sherlock Holmes,

are things you've been able to work on in your adult career.

Is that luck or the result of ruthless career planning?

It's all luck. Everything is, I think.

I mean, certainly with something like Doctor Who,

which is just always my favourite show.

And it's had a huge influence on me,

not just in the sort of things I'm interested in,

but wanting to get into the business.

Looking at credits,

Doctor Who was how I discovered what a script editor was,

or a producer or a director.

Sherlock Holmes, again, a boyhood obsession.

Which I have been lucky enough to be in a position, with Steve,

to bring back.

It's pure luck, I'm afraid.

The attraction of horror, which goes throughout your life,

Hammer and Doctor Who, which is kind of horror science-fiction,

that just started, presumably, the usual way.

Hiding behind the sofa watching Doctor Who.

Yes, I remember my first horror film was The Brides of Dracula,

the Hammer film.

I was about five.

My parents had a fantastically lax attitude towards it.

And Doctor Who, I have an image of myself watching it,

and from the beginning I was just totally hooked.

I absolutely fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

My first memory is the shop window dummies coming to life,

in Jon Pertwee's first story.

ALARM BELL

The Brides of Dracula would have been an 18 certificate.

-Oh! An X, indeed.

-X. So you were 13 years too young?

But, as we know, Mark, it's not a bad thing.

It was just never... It was only an issue years later,

when all of my school essays were about horror.

Every single one of them.

I would just twist everything into a sort of horror story.

Then my parents went to a parent-teachers evening

and came back in high dudgeon

and I was banned from watching horror films for, er, one night,

because it didn't last very long!

But, I believe very seriously that it's a nature nurture thing,

what can you say? Children will be frightened,

if you put a child in an entirely bare room

free of any scary influences, they would be frightened of the walls,

or of the person that came to say "Hello" to them.

Not just if you have a bent that way,

but that's how children relate to the world.

Obviously you have to be careful,

that's one of the things with making Doctor Who these days,

you're aware of the timeslot.

You might be going too far, it's about a reassuring kind of scare,

which is a sort of Ghost Train kind of scare.

You want to have the thrill

and then trundle out at the end and get a cuddle from your mum.

George! George, you have to face your fears.

You have to face them, now!

CHILD'S LAUGHTER

You have to open the cupboard!

We'll all be trapped here, forever, in a living death!

George! George! Listen to me.

George! George! Listen to me!

George!

Please! George, you have to end this!

End this! End it! End it now!

CHILD'S LAUGHTER

I always imagined your father being a stern north-eastern father

like in Alan Sillitoe books, and traditionalist.

But he seems to have been amazingly liberal about horror movies.

I tell you, my dad, who's 80 and going strong,

and fitter than I'll ever be!

It was... I think it was always really about what he wanted to watch.

In a funny way his largesse extended to us all.

Because he was determined to watch it,

so we were just very lucky to catch those things.

You grew up opposite this psychiatric hospital,

did it seem to you in childhood

as exotic and appropriate as it does to us now?

It was a psychiatric hospital where my father worked,

and briefly my mum did.

I think in retrospect,

I realised it contributed to a sort of domestic gothic,

I'd like to call it.

Only in the sense that it was very normal to us.

So, um, I think some of the things which have become

obsessions in my life

and things which actually make me laugh or interest me,

do stem from that sort of area.

I was going to say, if you had written rom-coms, or, indeed,

sitcoms of a conventional kind, we wouldn't make the connection,

but it is a very interesting connection.

It would be an interesting thing if I had, though!

But, it's not... All I can say, really,

is that when I was a little boy,

we used to go swimming there and I would have a haircut there.

We used to go to watch film shows. I remember watching Zulu, vividly.

And it was just part of the fabric of how we were growing up.

So I knew various disturbed patients,

I didn't go out to tea with them or anything like that,

but it was just part of our lives.

But my brother, who is a postman, and a happy person,

without any preoccupations like this,

also grew up in the same environment, so it's not entirely down to that.

To what extent would your parents, your father, bring work home?

-Would they talk about the hospital?

-Oh, yeah.

And, as I say, we used to go all the time.

I remember...

I suppose I remember a kind of childhood awareness,

and a slight fear of it.

When my mum worked there, she used to pick me up from school,

and I would go and stay there for a bit.

I remember, so vividly, there was a boy called Johnny Shillcock,

and he had warts all over his hands,

and I was terrified I was going to catch them,

I wasn't afraid I'd catch his psychiatric illness,

but I thought I might catch his warts.

-That's a formative memory, that is!

-Very revealing!

The speech of that area,

my grandparents are from the North East,

-and I still have an aunt and uncle in Newton Aycliffe, actually.

-Oh, really?

-Even now.

So I grew up very aware of those speech rhythms,

but quite good for a writer,

a very distinctive form of speech and there are all those surveys

showing that people want to be sold insurance on the phone by Geordies.

Well, there was a time when Scots, I think Scots are still top,

and I think Liverpudlian is probably bottom in terms of trustworthiness.

North-eastern wasn't there for a while,

but it's come up through the ranks.

Of course, it's not a Geordie.

It's Durham, and people get very particular about those things.

It's actually a much softer accent,

and Geordie is very difficult.

I find it... I remember, I have lost jobs because it's too hard to do,

they always get Tim Healy to do any voice over.

-So you can't do Geordie?

-Oh, it's very, very hard.

It's too hard to do, unless you're...

You have to be very confident about it,

because it's actually very specific,

and much more exaggerated than you imagine.

But Durham is, really it's like Vic Reeves' accent,

-Vic Reeves is from Darlington.

-Yeah.

-Which is near me.

It's just a softer kind of thing,

it's not "aboot" or any of those kinds of sounds,

because it's closer to Yorkshire, I think.

Have you modulated the accent for acting purposes?

If we had known you as a child, how would you have spoken?

I remember being accused of being posh when I was little.

Of course, I wasn't, but maybe comparatively.

-You were clearly middle-class though, weren't you?

-Oh, no.

-Really?

-No. No. I refute that.

No, not at all.

My dad was a hospital engineer and my mum was a secretary,

and we were from sturdy mining stock for 1,000 generations.

In fact, my dad was the first of his family not to go down the pit.

My dad and his brother.

They were on the surface, but before that, no...

I must have been consciously trying to posh myself up a bit, I suppose.

One of the things that got me into writing was I wrote an essay

in the third year juniors.

And everybody suddenly went crackers about it.

Oddly enough it was about Wimbledon.

I've never really been interested in Wimbledon.

I just put loads of the big words I knew into it.

And they went crazy and it won a prize and all sorts,

then I was, sort of, launched,

and my headmaster started calling me "Merlin".

The only nickname, to my knowledge, I've ever had.

And it was a beatification,

they had decided I was going to do things.

I can certainly remember wanting to be different.

There are huge surveys now

about the significance of what position you are in the family,

and your relationship to siblings and if affects how you turn out.

So where did you figure in the family tree?

Er, youngest.

And to my knowledge, not spoiled, despite what the surveys say.

No, I was a happy accident.

I remember my mum telling me years later,

I was slightly appalled to discover that!

-You wanted to be planned, did you?

-I suppose you always do, don't you?

You often read those things about the effect on people

when they realise they're adopted, it must be earth-shattering.

I remember thinking, it's that awful thing about chance, isn't it?

Chance is so scary, you could have been another egg.

It would have made such a difference to everything.

I remember thinking, "I think I would have liked to have been planned."

Was there quite a big gap?

My brother is three years older and my sister was seven years older.

So, not really, no. I suppose not.

And your siblings' attitude, were they doting towards you or not?

Well, my brother, who I'm very close to now,

but we fought like cats and dogs, as you're meant to.

-That's normal, isn't it?

-It sort of is and it isn't.

We just had nothing in common and for a long time

it was a big source of that sort of silly kind of conflict, really.

I think time bruises you in so many ways,

and we still have nothing in common,

but we just get along fine and we have a good laugh.

My sister, seven years is quite a long time, I think.

I mean, when I was five,

-she was considerably into...

-Big school.

-Big school.

And that makes a difference,

there was a sort of inevitable distance in that way.

You and your brother are a perfect study

for the argument about nature versus nurture.

You had broadly the same nurture

and yet you turned out so completely different.

Were you seen as, in inverted commas,

with all its connotations, as "different"?

Of course! I was seen as a poof, I'm sure, by most people!

-But your brother thought that, did he?

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think he always did. He probably knew before I did.

But, erm...

Well, yes, absolutely. I was, yeah, different.

But it was to do with things like not wanting to play outside

in the summer holidays.

Watching telly with the curtains drawn.

It was all of the things I have made a career out of.

I've prefer to look at it as a long revenge against PE teachers,

who always told me it would never come to anything.

I always had a very unhealthy relationship with sport.

I just couldn't see the point of being made to do rough games

when I could have been inside reading books or talking about horror films.

My friend and I used to walk around the perimeter of the pitch,

talking about Hammer.

Until the inevitable moment that a heavy wet football

would smack against our faces.

I still believe I have a supernatural ability to attract footballs.

I can walk past as an adult and a ball will hit me.

THEY LAUGH

We now know from various details and the Independent's list

of the 100 most prominent gay and lesbian people in Britain,

that you're gay. At what stage did you know growing up?

I'm sad because I've dropped to number 40.

I've obviously got to be gayer this year,

I thought I was being gay this year. 38 to 40.

I can remember, hmm...

I suppose I've always known.

That's an odd thing to say, because when you are that small

you don't really know what you're talking about.

Except I remember having a crush on Stuart Damon from The Champions,

when I was very little.

It was about, um...

I don't know, what can you say?

Whatever is the childhood version of fancying someone,

it can't be quite that, but there was just something about him.

And then other men had that effect on me.

But I never really went through much of a denial period, I think.

Even in your generation there was a fear, often,

of telling parents and people knowing.

-Did you have that?

-Oh, yeah, yeah.

I dreaded it.

The dreaded coming out conversation.

When it finally happened, it was a bit unexpected.

I suppose I had rehearsed various scenarios for years,

and then I was visiting home.

How old were you?

I was about 22.

So comparatively late, in that way.

I was visiting home from college,

and one night my mum just asked me.

And I think that's the one thing I hadn't expected,

that it would go that way around.

It was fine. Then I said, "I had better tell Dad."

She said, "No! It will kill him!"

Then, I went back to London, and I remember this so well,

I rang her up and she was just going through various news

and she said, "Oh, your uncle Jack came to see us,

"we've had snow, I told your dad, erm..."

She just popped it in, like that.

And then I remember having to go home

and, sort of, I remember going to see my sister and talking about it.

It was absolutely fine, but in a funny kind of way, erm,

I slightly stumbled over it.

I suppose I had expected it to be this great big moment.

It was sort of slightly fudged.

I think in a way I had to do it again about a year later.

It was one of those things where it was suddenly, "Right, fine..."

and it was dealt with.

But, you know, things have changed so much, I find it astonishing.

This is one of the things that is easy to forget

about how different this country is in the last 15 or 20 years.

When my partner, Ian, and I got married,

it was an unimaginable thing not so long ago.

For both of our families to come together and treat it as a wedding

and have, you know, absolutely no qualms and have a fantastic time.

That's an incredible achievement, I think.

I always wonder about that, because it's happened so quickly.

-If the battle won, now?

-No!

It's a very seductive idea that everything's fine,

and that it's incredibly easy for anyone to come out these days.

You can get that sort of thing from a metropolitan mindset,

rather than, despite the internet and everything,

there are obviously people feeling very isolated,

not just in tiny villages.

In other communities, because of their family circumstances,

or because of how they've been brought up,

or particularly religion, I think. Not at all.

You ended up at drama school, though?

I auditioned for a couple of drama schools and didn't get in.

I remember one, God! I still blush at this memory.

It was the Drama Centre, which had a fearsome reputation

for breaking down people's personalities

and then building them back up.

It was run by a man called Christopher Fettis,

and I was very excited about this audition.

I remember going, you had to prepare two pieces,

Shakespeare and a modern, I would imagine.

I did the Zoo Story, Edward Albee,

I can't remember what the other one was.

But it was just a little black stage with a panel.

I did one and he said, "Thank you very much, Mr Gates.

"Would you change your set, please?"

There was literally a black block, and I didn't know what he meant.

I thought it was some sort of theatrical term,

I imagine he meant would you now go on to your second piece.

So I took a breath and did the second one.

And like that he said, "Thank you very much."

I sat down and he said,

"Thank you very much. Tell me, when I asked you to change your set,

"why did you choose to completely ignore me?"

And he utterly destroyed me. Destroyed! It was HORRIBLE.

I remember getting on the Tube, shaking.

Thinking, "I'm not going to do this."

But, you know, in classic style, I bounced back.

But it was horrible. So when this opportunity to come to this...

When had you made the decision that you wanted to be an actor?

Because that's quite a big step.

To be honest, the only thing I ever wanted to do was act and write.

It sort of coalesced when I was at school.

That's from looking at the credits on Doctor Who

-and that kind of thing?

-Very much.

It was certainly an ambition

and obviously I went through all those things, as everyone ever does,

of being told you can do it as a fallback, you need a fallback thing,

or maybe you should just do am-dram,

and there would be an outlet there, or whatever. Those sorts of things.

All perfectly understandable and perfectly fine,

but I think it was definitely to do with the fact that academically

I couldn't have possibly become a scientist or anything like that.

Lots of people I know, like Ben Miller,

who's a bloody astrophysicist!

A proper one!

There was never any question, really.

I couldn't really do anything else, and happily that's worked out.

So, this degree course came up,

and it had quite a reputation, Bretton Hall.

What happened when I got there was that I met Steve Pemberton

and then Reece Shearsmith was the year below

and Jeremy Dyson was at Leeds University,

of which Bretton was a satellite college.

The course itself wasn't good at all.

Essentially, we just got on with it.

We put on our own shows, like in a Cliff Richard movie,

because we found the actual course pretty unfulfilling.

And completely without intending to,

it gave us a great grounding in just doing it ourselves.

Which, it really was, the fulcrum of The League of Gentlemen.

Was it creative love at first sight,

did something spark off early on between the four of you?

Yes, definitely.

Before there was any intention of doing anything with it,

Steve and I were doing things at Bretton.

We were doing plays for the National Student Drama Festival

and things like that.

What it was was a shared sensibility,

Steve is from Chorley, Reece is from Hull, Jeremy's from Leeds.

We just knew what we were talking about.

We knew, in that total shorthand kind of way,

the sort of places we'd all been brought up.

Obviously there are regional differences but it's the North.

And I do think, having for years denied it, there is a difference.

And I'm rather pleased with it now.

I used to be very cross, in the early days,

we were always described as "These four Northern lads."

Alan Bennett always talks about the same thing.

It would never happen the other way round, never!

These four southern poofs! I don't think they'd ever say that!

So, it's still very much coming from a slightly skewed

Southern metropolitan perspective. This other. But it is different.

But it's interesting, that.

Very often people in the North complain of the media,

perhaps rightly, that there's a southern bias.

I had to write an article about this, once. It amazed me.

When you write about the history of comedy,

particularly television comedy in this country

the huge majority comes from the North in different ways.

Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood, Alan Bleasdale, Jack Rosenthal,

Dick Clement, Ian La Frenais.

There is, and I think that's one of the important distinctions,

there is something about Northern speech and life which does,

which seems to be very fertile for comedy.

Absolutely, yeah. You're absolutely right. It's a brilliant thing.

There's a hugely rich seam going right back to music hall

and variety of those kind of...

I think it's people who were tested by fire.

And I don't just mean the war, I mean like Glasgow Empire!

But there's a kind of, there's an amazing kind of...

..eight shows a day kind of solidity to them.

It's what Ken Dodd represents. I remember talking to someone at Sunderland Empire once, actually.

-That they'd tried to get...

-Which is famously supposed to be

the hardest place for any comedian to play - and Glasgow.

-Glasgow and Sunderland.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

But someone there, they'd tried to book

some very famous current comic.

And he was going to do like an hour and three quarters for however much.

They laughed down the phone and said, "I can get Doddy to do 10 hours for that!"

And it's true. I mean, in the old days he used to send people home

to put their kids to bed, and then ask them to come back. You know.

Before The League Of Gentlemen took off, there was a Doctor Who period

where you wrote Doctor Who spin-off books

and unofficial Doctor Who straight-to-video releases, which are unavailable!

Was that... It was obviously the work of a fan.

Was that a conscious apprenticeship in writing and directing?

No. It was, eh...

It was what I think everybody faces, which is, what on earth am I going to do with my life?

Because I had... I knew what I wanted to do.

And I do remember, um, I do remember saying,

"What I would love to happen

"is to become well-known for something

"which would then give me opportunities."

That's actually what happened, which is incredible. But...

I mean, doing - certainly writing the Doctor Who books,

uh, what happened is the series came off the air and the BBC gave the license to Virgin Books.

They continued. So in a way that was what I'd always wanted to do,

because it was like writing a script for a story that was never made. Yet!

Um... That felt completely part of what I wanted to do as a writer.

It was brilliant, a dream come true.

The videos... had a similar sort of thing.

There wasn't a series, but some people wanted to see Who-ish things.

Um, and, you know, I would never be disparaging about them.

Principally because I got to work with Jon Pertwee. At the same time

I was just kind of scrambling around for, for a way through.

Because, um... because acting jobs obviously were scarce on the ground.

The first TV job I did was in the north-east. It was a series called Harry,

the sort of follow up to Boon with Michael Elphick.

And they actually advertised for Darlington-based actors.

So of course, I used my parents' address, and I got it.

Uh-huh. Mr Sherman is in a meeting.

-They're just fetching him.

-OK.

And then immediately afterwards I was offered a Catherine Cookson.

I thought, right, here we go! Then I didn't work for two years.

So, um... Yeah, it was very much a sort of...

..it was a sort of scattergun thing of, of, of...

This is vaguely - I know this is what I want to do,

but how I actually get there, who knows?

And League Of Gentlemen built in what is a fairly familiar route now

through stage, Edinburgh fringe, BBC radio, BBC TV.

Did you have a very clear sense of the route you wanted to go?

Um... I mean, that was then the classical route. Certainly that's what we wanted to do.

I do remember very clearly

a day when I thought, I am not going to be on the dole when I'm 30.

I'm going to make this work. We're going to make this work.

-How old were you then?

-Eh, 29!

Sorry, that was a terrible cheap joke! Eh, no, I was, um...

I was about...

..um, I don't know. 26, 27, something like that.

So, um, I had a very sort of clear moment of like,

...this could be it.

Uh, because we did these shows,

five shows, um, with a friend of ours

who was at Bretton with us and then left to go to Central.

He now directs The Catherine Tate Show and The Inbetweeners, Gordon Anderson.

And he put it together,

because he had a five-night gap in a festival of fringe shows that had already been on.

And he couldn't get his cast back together, and he asked us to put on a comedy show.

Again, it's so like a Cliff Richard movie, isn't it? It stinks.

But it went very well. And we suddenly thought, maybe this is what we could do.

We all grew up with Python and Not The Nine O'Clock News.

The idea of a team comedy,

for us as actors, to do character comedy,

which is what we'd always loved, and those kind of...

..performances just seemed like a natural thing.

And brilliantly, after many years of the dominance of stand-up,

character comedy was just coming back in.

Steve Coogan and John Thomson won the Perrier with character comedy.

It was just like, the time.

Um, so it suddenly felt like the right way to go.

One of my happiest memories of the League is, um,

going location hunting for what became Royston Vasey.

We went off in a van for a week.

And we basically were all outdoing each other

to try and recommend the worst place we could possibly go to.

LAUGHTER

And in the end Hadfield is where we shot it.

It was a brilliant combination, because actually

it has the other thing about the North not much celebrated,

which is that it's incredibly beautiful in a very particular way.

That little town with its high street and amazing moorland.

The way it developed, the drag acting and the intense disguise,

quite painful, I mean, the amount of tape you had to have on your face.

There was a lot of horror in the DNA of The League Of Gentlemen,

and a lot of that was to do with all of our childhood obsessions with Lon Chaney Senior

and his The Man Of A Thousand Faces. It was a great big, um, toy box to play with.

So right from the beginning we wanted to do as much as we could.

What's interesting is, to this day, people think it's about prosthetics.

We never used any prosthetics, never.

It's all just bits of... the local nose is fish skin,

glued up and pulled down - we tried everything like that.

It was about that wonderful thing of loving those grotesque characters

in a kind of Dickensian way.

Those are the ones everyone wants to play for obvious reasons.

In the writing of it, you would start grimacing

and imagining faces, would you?

No, it was more...

There was a lot of observational stuff,

that sounds ridiculous, it's not like the Comedy Store.

"I saw this guy, he ran a shop that had been there for 300 years."

We were hugely influenced by Clement, La Frenais,

Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood

and those speech patterns and those Northern realities.

So, even though there is a lot of grotesquery,

it is often based on a germ of something real.

But for the inciting incident of the local shop...

As soon as that phrase, a local shop for local people,

everyone recognised what that was, they had been in that shop.

What we did was, we extrapolated from it

so what's really funny about that real incident

is that four incredibly inoffensive young men went to the shop in Rottingdean

and it was like Straw Dogs in the mind of the owner.

I remember coming out and she said, "I have a husband, you know."

It all came from there.

What's going on, what's all this shouting?

We'll have no trouble here.

-They're strangers.

-Not local?

He wears a crown and build new roads.

-Look, there's been a misunderstanding.

-Your wife is...

-No good?

-Over-reacting.

We just need you to look at these proposals, that's all.

We just remember plonking all kinds of things into that scenario.

Then other ones like Les McQueen, failed musician,

very much based on real people

and that thing you can only get in real life,

an amazing turn of phrase, overheard in a bus queue or something.

Really profound sometimes and desperately sad.

I still remember when we did some of them in front of an audience,

the moment when Les McQueen hands over that tape,

he pulls it out of the drawer and he has hundreds of them

and the kid he's given it to has just left it.

There's a huge "ah" from the audience which I hated it at the time

but I rather like it now

because I can distinctly hear my mum in the audience.

That pathos is something we all responded to

in other people's work and I wanted to capture.

Nice to meet you Mr McQueen.

Good luck, son. God bless.

It's shit business.

AUDIENCE: Ah.

You'll find out.

It's pretty dark stuff, often, The League Of Gentlemen.

Where there any problems with the BBC of censorship or concern?

The joyous thing about the BBC,

I may be able to say, in those days, now, frighteningly.

They were amazingly supportive in terms of not interfering

because once we had got it through, once it was a hit,

they didn't just go, you can do what you like.

But they were brilliant about that sort of thing.

I remember John Plowman, our blessed executive producer,

always came with a sheaf of notes about a minute before transmission

and we would just go, piff, because there was nothing you could do.

People always talk about the darkness of it

and there are moments now,

whenever I catch it on the telly, especially in the Christmas special

when Papa Lazu as Santa kidnaps Bernice's mother in that flashback.

It's horrible actually, it rather disturbs me.

But most of it is more cartoony.

The real darkness is in the sadder stuff, the bleaker stuff.

That is properly dark.

-I couldn't find them, pop.

-What do you mean, you couldn't find them?

-Go and look harder.

-I think I should stay here.

Do as you're told, you little pig!

I'm sorry, I really have to leave.

You see? She doesn't love you any more.

Well, you cannot trust a woman.

Where there Beatles-like or Python-like tensions within League of Gentlemen?

Sort of.

We never really rowed, I think we sublimated quite a lot.

I used to write with Jeremy and Steven Reece,

I had originally started with Steve years before.

We did cross-pollinate.

The big thing is, it was always in an overview.

We did once try writing as a four which was hysterically disastrous.

What do you do?

Someone ends up having to hold the pen and make the tea

because I think, actually,

Jeremy and I used to be lost in admiration for Steven Reece's facility

with those amazing double acts

which they essentially wrote for themselves to do.

But at the same time, I think the stuff that Jeremy and I used to do

we used to think of ourselves as Jagger/Richards

and Lennon/McCartney in our amused moments.

There were only a few times, I remember,

thinking we'd done something really good and it didn't get a laugh.

There was one character, we spent ages on a drag queen

called Billy Van Day, he was kind of like Danny La Rue.

I'd seen recently this old clip of Danny La Rue on Bob Monkhouse's show.

It suddenly occurred to me how different things used to be

because he'd come in in this dress and a black wig and go,

"I'm Joan Collins, that is my name!

"I'm Joan Collins and Marlene Dietrich."

And that was kind of it!

So we'd go with this drag character who was kind of like that,

there wasn't really much of an impersonation going on.

We thought it was utterly hysterical. Nothing. Never went anywhere.

But, no, it was very happy generally,

because I think we were all

very much going in the same direction.

That's when collaborations work like that.

When we made our Christmas special, we just literally said

we want to make a Christmas special and it was the right time to do it.

I think that's still the best thing we ever did because it's

utterly born of love of horror and especially portmanteau horror films.

What we found was a unique moment in the life of that series

when the characters were well enough established to be

the protagonists of a horror film.

It wasn't like making a generic portmanteau, we could do a portmanteau

about our series and that's why I think it worked so strong.

We wrote it really quickly because we had always wanted to do it.

CHOKING

-Lee?

-What's happening?

Lee?

Lee? Lee!

-What's happening?

-Aagh, aagh, Lee!

Oh, someone help! Lee, you're bleeding, help!

-Donna?

-Problem solved, Stella.

What's this?

This is the price.

Help! Help!

She's murdered me husband! Help!

It's not my fault!

SCREAMS

And you are not disbanded, the League of Gentlemen?

No, we are like Abba. We've never officially.

Not at all. When we finished the film and the second tour, 2005,

we had a meeting. I remember this. This was a funny moment.

We did Derren Brown's show in the morning and then we had agreed

to have lunch afterwards to talk about what was next.

And I remember thinking, how will be going to get round to this issue?

So we did Derren's show and then we went to this spaghetti house

across the road and sat down.

A man came and gave us a jug of tap water and Steve said,

"So, what are we going to do?" And that was it straightaway!

But really, we would love to do something together again. But it's...

I'm very pleased that we didn't fall out or anything like that

because it's an amazingly important thing to me

and I owe it absolutely everything.

And them everything.

But we've all got different ambitions

and I think far better to work through those and enjoy that

and then come back together positively, than to strain to keep

-together when people are heading in a slightly different directions.

-And Monty Python,

I think it is also accepted that they were competitive

about the individual projects they then went on to.

But are the four of you like that?

I don't think so.

Steve and Reece has asked me to be in Psychoville

and I had initially thought that I shouldn't do this because then

it sort of muddies the water but it was the perfect one to do

as the guest part and actually, I'm really proud of having been in that.

I think it's incredible.

I can say that because I didn't write it but I think it's

an incredible technical piece of work, if nothing else.

That episode. It was lovely.

I don't think we would have been able to do it

unless we'd had those years of shorthand

because it was so technically difficult to do in two takes.

-Would you like a tea Mr...

-Yes, please. Griffin.

Chief Inspector Griffin.

As in... Police inspector not parking meters.

Whoa!

If only it was so frivolous.

No, I was just saying, Mrs Pike, I'm in the area investigating

-a recent series of murders.

-Oh, shit in heaven.

It seems your son here may have a link to one or more of the victims.

-Have you?

-No.

Oh, well, there you are, thanks for coming.

Whenever we meet up, we have such a laugh.

We have just done Horrible Histories. This is our official reunion.

We did six sketches for Horrible Histories which is a brilliant show,

very honoured to be asked.

We had such a laugh the whole day and of course,

it all comes flooding back.

I realised that I couldn't do that schedule any more. It's punishing!

But the incredible thing was, the gifted cast of that show,

they were very respectful, almost nervous.

-I said to Steve, we have become venerable.

-Yes, the elder statesmen.

When did that happen? I know! Terrifying!

Talking about some of the things you've done separately,

an interesting strain of biographical acting,

Bamber Gascoigne in Starter For 10, Johnny Craddock in Fear Of Fanny

-and Malcolm McLaren in Worried About The Boy.

-I am the poor man's Michael Sheen!

Yes. But it is an interesting technical little area of acting.

How do you approach those roles?

It needs to be not an impersonation, but a performance.

Well, I find it fascinating whenever one comes up.

It's a real challenge.

I think you have to be interested in the person

and think of it, "Right, I can do something with this."

This is such a cliche, but it's true. I always start with the voice.

It's no shoes for me, it's voices.

If I can't get the voice of the character, I'm lost.

And whatever I have to do to create one or get it.

So I watched a lot of Bamber.

I talked to a few people and I noticed that he was always smiling

so I just did that, never stopped smiling.

And he also had that slight hesitation in the voice,

-that his voice would vibrate.

-Yes, I'd just try and get it.

I'm quite a good mimic so I can pick up those things.

And especially if I listen to it a lot, I can just do it.

Without further ado, he is your first starter for 10.

Listen carefully before you buzz.

On a straight line graph with Y against X, where the gradient

of the line this 2 and the Y intercept is five, what is the value of Y when X is 10?

-Salmon, Queen's.

-25?

Correct, for 10 points, so Queens, three bonus questions.

The best ones are not a straight impersonation, it's an inhabitation.

It's something a bit other.

But Malcolm McLaren was difficult because I couldn't...

I found it very difficult to get the voice.

I watched tons of stuff, his brilliant South Bank Show,

which was like the main thing from about '86 or something like that.

The thing that cracked it was Larry the Lamb.

The one thing was he talked to people as if he was blind.

(AS MALCOLM MCLAREN) And then I realised that he had this sort of cracked quality to it,

and he talks like that.

Those two things together, I thought, I think I've got him now.

And then with the fright wig, I was off!

You plucked up all that courage, came more this way,

just to sing a Sunday-school hymn.

It was in my head.

(Do you hear that?)

That is the sound of no-one applauding.

Get used to it.

Sherlock, it's odd to think this now

but it had a little stumble at the beginning, didn't it,

because the pilot episode was never transmitted although it is

available on the box set, but I remember there were mutterings

in corridors at the BBC, there was a panic about that series at the beginning.

The reason we eventually put it on the DVD was to stop that

because it's very good.

The pilot is very good and we would have been very happy.

It was originally commissioned a six hour-long episodes.

And then when we made the pilot, they asked for three 90s.

I think largely because of the success of Wallander in that format.

But we knew we couldn't just bolt on another half hour

so Steve rewrote it, Steve Moffat rewrote it and we re-made it with a different director.

-There were stories in the paper saying it was a disaster.

-Exactly. That's what I mean.

You realise you have got absolutely no comeback, what do you do?

It was literally because of an internal decision to make it in

another format, this gossip gets out and I remember thinking, if we don't

show people that it's not a disaster, this will live with us forever.

I suppose the argument is that you preserve the final version

sacrosanct and maybe show people in 35 years' time or something.

But, I personally thought that that was an insult, both to

the original director and to the production because it is very good.

-The second one is significantly more stylish though?

-Yes, I think it is,

but it is a different beast.

What has happened to Sherlock has taken us all by surprise.

We were very confident about it,

but it is an amazing thing after three episodes to get this level

of total fan ownership and expectation about the next lot.

But also, the stories were telling... they are epic.

They are film-length stories and that is what you have to do.

-How did you know she had a suitcase?

-Back of the right leg.

Tiny splash marks on the heel and calf not present on the left.

She was dragging a suitcase behind her. You don't get that splashback in any other way.

A smallish case, going by the spread.

A case that size, a woman this clothes conscious,

could only be an overnight bag so we know she was only staying one night.

-Now where is it? What have you done with it?

-There wasn't a case.

Say that again.

There wasn't a case, there was never any suitcase.

Suitcase! Did anyone find a suitcase?

Was there a suitcase in this house?

-Sherlock, there was no case!

-They take the poison themselves.

They chew, swallow the pills themselves. There are clear signs, even you lot couldn't miss.

Right, yeah, thanks, AND?

It's murder, all of them. I don't know how.

And they're not suicides, they're killings - serial killings.

We've got a serial killer.

Love those, always something to look forward to.

And you are, which is where we started,

you're very unusual in this, the extent to which you've been able to

pursue your childhood enthusiasm in Sherlock,

but also the Lucifer Box series of novels you've written,

which again, history and horror, it's all there.

-Sickening, isn't it?

-Yeah, it is actually, yeah.

No, absolutely, and I count my blessings every day

because it's a brilliant position to be in, it's a real privilege

and I mean, I've had, you know...

I hope I've got good taste

and I've managed to pursue the right things.

It didn't always work.

There have been things, but...

What do you regard as the disasters?

Well, I wouldn't say... Would I say that?

I was sure you were going to talk about Sex Lives of the Potato Men

and yet you haven't, so I won't talk about it.

I did a series called Clone,

which people were fighting to do

and I remember doing it

because it was what I call a black glove part, it was a proper baddie.

You never get to do these things, you know.

It was a mad colonel and he just didn't work at all,

just didn't work.

Happily, no one saw it, but I was really miserable doing that job

and that's when I realised that...

How important and how lucky I am

to have as much control as I do over things that I work on or I'm in.

Colonel, we're just in the midst of...

-Applying for a new job?

-Actually, we've just run every test known to man.

-Have you performed an autopsy?

-Autopsy? He's still alive.

For now. If I were him, I wouldn't make dinner plans.

Colonel, you've got to give me more time.

You just don't get it, do you? My career is on the line!

-What about my career?

-Your career is over, it's ancient history,

like a dial-up internet connection or pubic hair in porn.

LAUGHTER

-Sex Lies of the Potato Men...

-You said!

I don't blame you for it, because it wasn't really your project.

No, it wasn't.

I'm just interested, did people working on it think it was good?

Again, I only found out subsequently, it was an incredibly hot thing.

I have actor friends who auditioned

and were gutted when they didn't get it

and there was someone who actually stalked the director at a football match to try and get in it.

The intention was,

and certainly the script that I was originally given,

it was meant to be a sort of Ken Loach, Robin Askwith film.

It was definitely a kind of modern confessions film

but verging on the bleak side somehow, if that makes any sense,

and it read very, very amusingly and then just didn't work at all.

I'm very grateful to this day

for properly working with Julia Davis, who I only knew slightly.

Nothing would have happened as a collaboration without that.

But it was an amazing time.

When it came out, I didn't get loads of phone calls from the press,

but I sort of hid for a couple of days because it broke.

For people not around, it was front page news.

It was supposed to be the most disastrous British movie of all time.

It's all, of course, to do with Lottery funding.

I remember a friend of mine rang me up to congratulate me

because the Daily Mail headline contained the words "filth and fury,"

so it's as close as you're going to get to your Pistols moment.

Oh, hello. What's his name?

Bobby, like Bobby dazzler.

Aw!

Say hello, Bobby, say hello to...

Oh, I'm Shelley. This is Crystal.

Hello Crystal.

Stop! Don't do that, Crystal!

Bobby, stop it!

-Crystal, stop it!

-Bobby, stop it!

The 40s, the decade you're in,

that is notoriously quite a difficult time,

when personal and professional doubts are supposed to set in and things go wrong.

Do you have any sense of all that?

No, not in a personal sense. I mean, I'm just...

I'm very...

Having been through family losses,

and getting to the stage I am, very happy professionally,

I'm very aware of trying to live in the moment and appreciate it.

Not do so much that I don't have time to enjoy it

and smell the flowers, but also, that the work itself is the reward,

it's a fantastic position to be in.

And there is a side of being a performer

which is unimaginable to people who don't do it,

which is having to keep going, or at least trying to,

you know, deaths of parents and so on,

you still have to somehow hold together

but you got to a point you had to withdraw from a play

because it simply isn't possible sometimes to do both.

Yes, yes.

I mean, that was, I suppose, a particular circumstance

because I was about to open in a play at Hampstead

and my sister was dying and it was very, I mean...

She'd had cancer for four or five years.

I remember taking a call from my brother in rehearsals

and it kind of came out, I suppose in that way

of not kind of quite talking about it or not quite facing it

and Jill never really spoke about it in that way,

but we had some plans for Christmas.

The family were going to come down to us for the first time

and it was all still, as far as I was concerned, going to happen

and then my brother spoke to a nurse friend of my sister's about Christmas

and she said, I don't think Jill will be here at Christmas.

And he rang me up and that was like a hammer blow.

I remember it distinctly.

And then suddenly, everything...

I remember going through the next few days -

it runs in a kind of dream - and because it was a ghost story,

I actually found it very affecting and then I just...

I just said, "I've got to speak to the director afterwards."

I said, "I've got to go." I couldn't...

It wasn't a question of "the show must go on" in that way,

I mean, what are life's priorities? It's a play.

It's inherent in the word, it's a play, life goes on.

But I could not be not there in my sister's last days. And...

That's just how it is.

I mean, I know, God, people who've worked for

Scrooge- and Marley-like theatre companies,

who were not allowed to have days off for funerals and stuff like that.

I mean, it's terrible,

but if you're able to say, "I'm sorry, but I'm not,"

then that's what you got to do.

You mention the showbiz tradition that the show must go on

and in the memoirs of Les Dennis, which I recommend to anyone,

it's a incredibly frank account of being a performer,

but he reveals that he went on stage almost immediately

after the deaths of both his parents and indeed

the death of his comedy partner and there is, to a non-performer,

a kind of brutality in that -

the idea that you just should be able to keep going.

I think that's true.

I think there's a difference though, between...

I remember going on stage the day I heard my mother was dying

and that's one of the best nights in the theatre I'd ever spent.

I felt light because I knew nothing really mattered.

I didn't have a shred of any kind of nerves, I felt that I was very good!

Because I think you can pour things into it.

You can use the experience, which might sound a bit mercenary,

but I don't think it is, I think it's a way of dealing with it.

If you then went home and sat on your own and bawled,

it wouldn't perhaps have the sane feeling.

I think there's a big difference between that kind of thing

and a slightly hard-edged thing

which is a kind of admirable professionalism,

but, you know, you hear stories of actresses having children induced

so they can make the first night, so I'm not sure about that!

But for me, for instance, pulling out of a play

in order to be at my sister's bedside was what I had to do.

Going on stage when something has happened is slightly different

because it's happened and therefore it's about how you cope with it

and your particular way may be to say "I can't cope with it,"

-but for a lot of performers something takes over, doesn't it?

-Mmm.

The show must go on and it's a sort of tip of their hat

to the people who have gone on.

My dad died a few years ago but I was shocked by everything you've read about it -

all the novels and people have told you,

just the metaphysical shock it is when you lose a parent

-which actually you can never be prepared for.

-I agree.

The only mysteries of life is that everyone thinks it's a surprise

and of course everyone's experience is different, but...

God, what can you say?

It's, er, it's a blow that you can't possibly prepare for.

I don't know what it's... What can you say?

It's... It's got so many things tangled up in it.

It's got things you said,

it's got old arguments,

old prejudices - all kinds of things...

And you have to deal with all that as well,

not just the sheer extraordinary fact of physical absence - for me

I can never get used to it,

and I mean time changes things but I do remember for a short time

afterwards you do think, "Oh, I must tell... Oh."

And it gets you like that. I remember Russell T Davies

saying to me, about his mum,

"It's like joining a terrible secret club

"and the most awful part

"is that everyone eventually becomes a member."

Professionally, is there anything you think,

"I wish they'd let me do that"?

Is there anything you want to do professionally that you haven't been able to?

-No!

-People will hate you!

No, I mean, God, I've ticked so many boxes

and every time one comes up I still feel slightly ashamed.

I've just done Being Human playing

the king vampire and we did a big long take of this scene where

I was draped over the throne like King John

and I has such a good time and by the end of this take

I said to the director,

"Do you mind if I play this part for the rest of my life?"

I think I'd been building up to it since I was about five.

I mean, there are certain things I'd love to do.

Jacob Marley is a part I'd love to play.

It's very particular to me, A Christmas Carol,

it's my favourite Dickens and it's kind of also my favourite story.

It means a lot to me for all kinds of reasons partly because it has

a sort of sentimental reputation and it's actually extremely bleak.

At it's heart of course is a terribly disappointed man

but it's the redemption that appeals to me

and the reason I love Marley is he hasn't got any.

He intercedes on Scrooge's behalf but it's too late for him

and I find that...

I love it.

The line in Christmas Carol which I remember makes my hair

stand on end is so simple.

Scrooge says, "Spirit, what do you want with me?" And he says "Much."

Lovely.

Mark Gatiss,

-thank you very much.

-Thank you.

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