In a League of Their Own

"Welcome to Royston Vasey. You'll never leave": Herr Lip (Steve Pemberton), Hilary Briss (Mark Gatiss) and Geoff (Reece Shearsmith) in the Royston Vasey Churchyard. Courtesy Universal Pictures International.

We are all local people somewhere, aren’t we? Each of our hometowns, villages or neighbourhoods comes with its own customs, which might seem just a touch odd to an outsider.

Take my small dot of a hometown on Vancouver Island, where every summer, a group of marine-minded citizens tries to race modified bathtubs over 36 miles of choppy waters in the Georgia Strait. The residents munch on a dessert called the Nanaimo bar (made from coconut and softened butter) and occasionally pay tribute to a statue of a former mayor that depicts him as a pirate, sword held aloft.

Weird? Yes, but it’s impossible to find a town more bizarre than Royston Vasey, the fictional setting of the BBC comedy series The League of Gentlemen. In Newfoundland, newcomers drink rum and kiss a cod as part of the local screech-in ceremony. In Royston Vasey, newcomers are tied up and doused with hot tar while the female proprietor of a local shop performs a pagan dance around them, clutching at her drooping breasts.

Since 1999, Royston Vasey’s quirks have been revealed in a series of sketches performed and written by the four men who make up the comedy troupe League of Gentlemen. Royston Vasey has been the setting for the three League of Gentlemen television series, plus their Christmas special, as well as a successful stage version of the show that toured the country in 2000 and 2001 and ran for six weeks at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane in London. Now, the League is bringing its creations to the big screen — a move that both excites fans and sets them on edge.

Up to now, television has been the most natural place to develop the town’s roster of freakish characters. There’s Pauline, who works at the local job centre and nurtures the unemployed with cries of “Get up, dole scum!” Anyone looking to get to the other side of Royston Vasey will encounter Babs, the pre-op transvestite who drives Babs Cabs under the slogan “Across Town, Across Gender Barriers.”

Local yokels: Tubbs Tattsyrup (Steve Pemberton) and Edward Tattsyrup (Reece Shearsmith) are proprietors of Royston Vasey's local shop. Courtesy Universal Pictures International.

Most memorable are the two pig-faced shopkeepers, a husband and wife named Edward and Tubbs, who run what they loudly proclaim to be “a local shop for local people.” Tubbs is so insular, so provincial, that she can't believe there might be a world outside Royston Vasey. “Lines and lines and lines and lines!” she squeals when an unfortunate visitor shows her a road map of England. “What do they mean? What is Lon-don?” Peeking from behind the counter with an upturned nose and a body like a pickle jar, Tubbs interrogates each new customer with what has become the series’ immortal line: “Are you local?”

This idea of local-ness takes on a suitably horrific undertone. The sketches — beautifully shot on location in the town of Hadfield, Derbyshire — could be described as the Kids in the Hall remounting the film The Wicker Man. Anyone who has spent time in the smaller towns of England will recognize the suspicious glances from the family-run corner shop and the bleakness of the row houses.

The League recently unveiled its film, entitled The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse, in theatres around the U.K. In the preceding weeks, phone boxes in London were plastered with a particularly effective piece of marketing. On a poster on the door, Edward and Tubbs stare out at passersby, clutching each other, their pig noses pointing skyward. "Local Call?" reads the text above.

This League is not to be confused with the awful Sean Connery film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or the bowlers in the recent documentary League of Ordinary Gentlemen. These gentlemen have been performing in their wigs and dresses with their ingenious range of accents since 1996, and are made up of the round-faced one (Steve Pemberton); the rangy, red-haired one (Mark Gatiss); the relatively good-looking one (Reece Shearsmith); and the one who writes the material but rarely performs (Jeremy Dyson).

The League rose to prominence after winning the prestigious Perrier Award at the 1997 Edinburgh Festival. Spots on radio followed, but it was the eponymous television show that brought the grey skies and boundless perversions of Royston Vasey to life. Radio cannot, for instance, convey the comedic splendour of the town’s hapless veterinarian birthing a cow in front of a group of curious schoolchildren. To ease the delivery, he decides to tie a rope around the unborn calf’s legs. Aiming for the birth canal, he puts his hands instead into a nearby orifice, ties his rope around the cow’s intestines and pulls them out onto the floor. The children watch. The cow collapses.

Axing for trouble: Mad butcher Hilary Briss (Mark Gatiss) does battle with supernatural forces. Courtesy Universal Pictures International.

Is this funny? Of course — in the same way the Kids in the Hall could pare down anarchic humour to an almost perfect two minutes of performance, the League reveals its brilliance in its darkest material. British television has recently seen David Brent revelling in the pettiness of workplace politics in The Office. That show became a North American cult hit; the League deserves the same, especially since the group’s comedy goes further out, into what lurks beyond suburbia.

I wish, however, that there were a stronger trans-Atlantic line of communication between sketch troupes. There is a tragedy with the League’s new film, and it is a tragedy that is global, not local. It seems no one told the League what happened to the Kids in the Hall when they made a similar leap to the big screen. The Kids’ 1996 film, Brain Candy, bears a striking resemblance to Apocalypse in the way it waddles about, losing its sharpness in an overbearing effort to advance the plot.

What is good about the League on television is lost on film. The willfully obscene and surreal humour that creeps into the world of Royston Vasey on the small screen is replaced by drawn-out stretches of exposition. The conceit of the film is that the residents of Vasey are facing an apocalypse because over in a parallel reality their creators have decided not to write any further episodes of the show. The film takes its cue from films like Adaptation and The Purple Rose of Cairo, which examine the relationship between fictional creations and the real world. There are grim signs foretelling the end of the local town and the only way to stop the characters’ demise is for them to cross over to our reality via a secret passage and confront their creators.

“There was a lot of Charlie Kaufman-esque stuff around,” said Shearsmith in a recent interview on the subject of inspiration. “A lot of films within films.”

This is part of the problem. Sketch troupes want their fans to grow with them as they pursue new forms. In the film, the League pays tribute to everything from Hammer horror films of the ’70s to historical dramas to The Poseidon Adventure. It’s ambitious, but audiences — who are generally ungrateful — usually just want to laugh. The League of Gentlemen is guilty of the bait and switch. The characters plastered all over central London advertisements made what might be charitably called “minor cameos” in the film, while some of the other pale and marginally funny residents of Royston Vasey took the spotlight.

Chase sequences puff up the film, as does the string of expositional scenes. By the time Apocalypse winds down with its alternate worlds colliding in Royston Vasey, the trio of Gentlemen onscreen looks drained. I hope this is not the end of the League. They’re too good, too ingenious to splinter off into sitcoms or more palatable BBC dramas. Even if they’re not drawn back to the streets of Royston Vasey, here’s hoping the League of Gentlemen return to their sketches — the beauty of the short form — and to those local customs they know so well.

Craig Taylor is a feature writer for The Guardian in London, England.