drbenway

Has anyone seen the League FO Gents film yet?

David Challinor

No - there is a web site for the trailer though. I was shocked to see the poster in Epsom Odeon. Release date April 22.
Will they re-tred the same stuff from the tv series? Hopefully they'll have new material. I'm guessing, but I think they'll reprise the Monty Python method for ''Something completely different'' - an attempt to crack the US market by re-shooting their successful sketches.
Do love that series though, and I bet the BBC's version will continue to beat the pants off the cinema version for charm, if not finances.
.....'Daveeeeeeeee'

ramsbottom

Will it be on at the Local cinema!!!!!!

DB7

For the locals

The two dog-walkers look up at the hillside church of Saints Mary and Patrick in the Co Galway town of Avoca. The forecourt has been transformed into a muddy swamp. Blank-faced zombies moan menacingly, towers of flame shoot hundreds of feet into the sky. A vicar in drag tries to marshal order, while a man in a black, bejewelled cloak and pantaloons sits in a chair having make-up applied.
Pretty extreme, eh, I say to the dog-walkers.

“Nah. We had Matthew McConaughey here for Reign of Fire,” says one dismissively.

“And Ballykissangel for five years before that,” says the other. They walk off, distinctly underwhelmed.

The League of Gentlemen are in town to film the climax to The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, a spin-off film from the highly successful TV series set in a village of the damned, populated by terrifying grotesques and misfits. When it made its debut on BBC Two in 1999, there was nothing like it — twisted sitcoms began and ended with Absolutely Fabulous — and it ushered in a new era of gleefully warped primetime comedy (Little Britain , Nighty Night).

The plot of the movie, as fans would hope, is complicated, perverse and rather silly: the four real-life members of the League of Gentlemen, Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson (except that he is played by the actor Michael Sheen, to confuse things further), come face to face with their fictional creations — principally Hilary Briss, Royston Vasey’s murderous butcher, whose “special stuff” in sausages causes riots; Herr Lipp, the Germanic pederast; and the hapless factory worker Geoff Tipps.

The trio are alarmed to discover that a) they are fictional creations, and also [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif[/img] their creators plan to wash their hands of them and write a film set in the 17th century instead. Their inner divas kick in and they plan to terrify the League into keeping them alive. In a deliriously confusing movie within a movie, real and fictional and past and present worlds collide. The end of the world is nigh.

Gatiss and company have taken the brave step of downgrading other popular characters to cameos — including Tubbs and Edward (back, despite being killed off in the TV series twice before) and the bitchy restart programme leader Pauline. “We wanted to focus on less high-profile characters,” says Gatiss. “Some are just too bizarre to take the lead roles.”

Gatiss and Pemberton play five characters each and Shearsmith seven. (The make-up is amazing and tortuous; dental plates, body padding, even teats to widen nostrils are used.) There are cameos from Simon Pegg, Peter Kay and Victoria Wood. The plot includes a three-headed serpent, portals to other worlds and a poor serf whose job it is to clean the king’s bottom. Along with Avoca, the film was shot in Dublin, Soho and Hadfield, the Derbyshire town used for the TV series.

The big-studio, bombastic verve of the project serves to remind us just how far the League have come since meeting as students at Bretton Hall college in Leeds. The characters of Royston Vasey began life on the stage (the League won the 1997 Perrier Award). A radio show followed (netting them a Sony award; see a pattern emerging?). The TV series, which ran for three seasons as well as a Christmas special, garnered a Bafta and a Golden Rose of Montreux.

The movie has been four years in gestation and marks the tenth anniversary of the first League of Gentlemen stage show. “We worried we would not be able to do it,” Gatiss confesses. “We were nervous about falling into the usual spin-off pitfalls. We wanted to do something you can get if you’ve never seen the show before, but which, if you have, rewards your loyalty. We didn’t want to just pack them off to the Costas, like those film spin-offs of 1970s comedies.”

Pemberton offers that the League has always been influenced by cinema. “Most comedy is fairly comfortable. What we’ve always brought to our work is a sense of ambition and a sense of the unexpected.” Shearsmith adds that a film was inevitable. “Our writing has developed towards longer stories, including the Christmas special. The question was, ‘How could we make it cinematic?’” “Shaun of the Dead, which was a brilliant film, proved there was a market for anarchic, off-the-wall horror,” says Gattis, a fan of Gothic horror from an early age when he’d stay up to watch the likes of Brides of Dracula. “We didn’t want to do a retread of the TV show with all the catchphrases. We were given the chance to do a movie with explosions, time travel and monsters and we went for it.”

Gatiss plays himself, Matthew Chinnery, Royston Vasey’s vet, Briss, job-seeker Mickey, and 17th-century plotter Sir Nicholas Sheet-Lightning. He surveys the chaos at the church, including a little troupe of lichen-covered fake graves. “We all kept our fingers crossed that no-one would die in Avoca last week because if they did this lot would have to have been cleared.”

The original idea had been to write a film set in the 17th century called The King’s Evil. But then, in a North London supermarket, Pemberton suddenly thought how odd it would be to look up from the freezer counter and come face to face with Pauline. A new film took shape. The League worried that they would be perceived as being self-indulgent by playing themselves, but ploughed on. They decided that the emphasis would be on how their creations viewed them rather than the other way round.

The characters kidnap Pemberton, and Herr Lipp, who is also played by Pemberton (keep up at the back), takes his place in the real family home only to discover that he makes a genuinely better father than the actor. Hilary Briss goes from murderous baddie to community saviour; Geoff Tipps from zero to hero. “All the characters undergo real transformations,” says Gatiss. This is something of a self-consciously postmodern spectacular. The film is as much about the process of storytelling as it is a silly story featuring giraffe orgasms and masturbatory mini-devils. But Gatiss denies any high-minded intent: “We’re not actively trying to destroy Royston Vasey on any other level than making what we hope is a funny film. We’re not deconstructing characters or ourselves.”


Yet the film makes a big deal about the “real League” being keen to disassociate themselves from their Royston Vasey creations.
“We’re still fond of those characters,” says Gatiss. “But it’s ten years since we created them so there is an element of us asking: ‘What shall we do next?’ I think it would be very hard to go back and do another TV series like the previous ones after this movie.”

Does that mean no more TV show? “We never say never,” says Gatiss. “But it would have to be very different. Look at Alan Partridge: that started out a sketch, became a chat show, then a brilliantly bleak sitcom. I’m looking at the moment of perhaps taking three characters — Pauline, Ricky and Ross might work — and crafting a show around them. That’s if the film is a success. And that’s a big if.”



Fans and non-fans at test screenings have liked it, but not everyone is impressed. James Christopher, The Times film critic, says: “I thought the ‘trick’ of having the characters stepping through the fourth wall to haunt their ‘real life’ alter egos was too naff for words. I’m usually a huge fan, but this was criminally boring. I think they’ve flogged the Vasey scenario to death.”

Certainly the show suffers from a kind of Fawlty Towers effect: because of re-runs and DVDs, it feels as if Royston Vasey has been around longer than the show’s actual three seasons.

It was undoubtedly a big influence on new shows — “I think we were definitely the start of the ‘dark comedy’ movement,” says Gatiss, “although once you name something, it dies. The acceptable norms of comedy have altered completely. Things that were once completely beyond the pale are now almost mainstream. I think we have genuinely contributed to a debasing of society and morality. I don’t think Nighty Night or Little Britain would have been allowed on mainstream channels had we not pioneered down roads less travelled.”

But this “movement” may also have had its day. Gatiss proffers that we live in “troubled times” and, as such, the kind of comedy the League paved the way for may be on its way out. “I think there might be a movement away from the dark stuff,” he says, “to something more gettable, something you can just kick off your shoes and watch.”

Yet the League still think there is potential in the Royston Vasey franchise. They will tour a big new stage show, The League of Gentlemen Are Behind You, next autumn. Gatiss says it is a “magical panto spectacular featuring Royston Vasey favourites and dancing boys — what’s the point of dancing girls?” Each of the men is involved in his own projects — Gatiss has written a few of the new Doctor Whos (“I had to go on to Radio 4’s PM and defend its scariness, which was a dream come true”) and is writing the show’s Christmas special; he’s also appearing in the new series of Nighty Night, and has a role in Woody Allen’s Match Point (as does Pemberton). Shearsmith will soon appear in As You Like It in the West End with Sienna Miller. Dyson has written a comedy drama, Funland, which Gatiss will star in.

If Apocalypse is a success, Royston Vasey may well live on. “We know some will say ‘Can’t they think of anything new to write?’,” Gatiss says. “The big thing for us was to produce a British comedy with ambition — something bold, funny and original.”

David Challinor

Having read about the plot - though not seen the film - it sounds like self-consciously dire.

samkydd

I saw their live stage show at the theatre in 2001, local theatre, and I hadn't seen the series at all beforehand. I thought it was very well thought out and even though I was unfamiliar with the characters it was very entertaining. I may see the film, although a game of footy on the beach followed by a drink at the local is more of an evening attraction than the flicks at this time of year!

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