The League of Gentlemen: Apocalypse
Comedy
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It isn't local, they are coming to our streets.
The BBC2 cult classic The League of Gentlemen takes to the big screen in their finale of the series.
Many people may not get the League of Gentlemen, but this hilarious black comedy is a sure hit with all the fans.
It's not the biggest, while saying that it's not the smallest film either.
The League of Gentlemen have come a long way from the clubs they started out in. Their radio series was a classic, bringing the best of their stage sketches together in the fictional town of Spent.
When they moved to TV, Spent became Royston Vasey, and the resulting darkly comic masterpiece won just about every award going. This is perhaps because the material that it comprised had been gestating for about six years in various forms; it was honed, perfect, tight. But TV eats up material at an alarming rate, and is always hungry for more.
The second series was less of a series of linked sketches, and boasted a stronger unifying narrative, but was perhaps slightly less funny. The third was even more ambitious, abandoning the laugh track and telling a set of six linked stories like some supremely twisted Tales of the Unexpected. It was hit and miss, containing some of the best, and worst work the troupe had produced. At times it seemed that the pressure to deliver, combined with their ambition to expand their scope, had left them too little time to actually be funny.
Two things were obvious - they had outgrown BBC2, and their next project needed a longer lead in so as to avoid the quality drop caused by the rush to produce new material to keep the TV deadlines happy. A movie seemed the obvious choice, offering a longer gestation period to help keep the quality up, and a broader canvas to widen the narrative options.
The big question, though, was whether a movie would signal a break with their past, or whether it would return again to Royston Vasey. Surely the town had been milked dry? If the team were to succeed they had to prove there was more to them than that. So when the premise of the film became public knowledge - the characters from Royston Vasey learn that they are about to be abandoned and track down their creators to force them to keep the town going - it seemed clear that the real struggle to move beyond the confines of their previous work was going to be writ large in cinemascope, metatext overwhelming text entirely. Surely such an idea would be self indulgent and doomed to failure…?
Thankfully, not only have they pulled it off magnificently, but they have remembered the most important thing of all - how to be very, very funny indeed.
From the best mobile phone gag ever, and an early crowd pleasing turn by the show's three most outlandish characters - Tubbs, Edward and Papa Lazarou - the film swiftly moves on to a series of sketches designed to introduce new viewers to the characters from the TV show - Doctor Chinnery does a terrible thing to a giraffe, Bernice harangues a confessor, Mickey and Pauline fly a kite, Hilary Briss wields his butcher's knife, and Herr Lipp deluges hapless scouts with innuendo.
Viewers new to the League are given a crash course in who the characters are and what to expect from them, before the real story takes hold and Briss, Lipp and hapless loser Geoff emerge into the real world to track down their real life counterparts Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Mark Gatiss.
Here is where the film really comes into its own. A film requires character development and evolution if it is to work, things which broadly defined comedy characters can never really exhibit, so it is quite wonderful when Herr Lipp learns to move beyond being a one pun gag and Geoff finds that he can be quite heroic. Before too long the grotesques of Royston Vasey have become something they very rarely were on TV - sympathetic, even likeable. It seems hard to believe, but the League of Gentlemen prove that they actually have hearts.
That these characters then find themselves drawn into the mad 17th century world of the League's replacement movie script gives scope for an even weirder turn of events... but it would spoil the surprises to tell you any more. Just be prepared for far and away the oddest movie you've ever seen.
Happily, the oddness and softening of the characters don't dull the comedy one jot. Whereas in Series Three of the TV show it seemed that the narrative occasionally swamped the laughs, here their touch is far more deft, and the gags rarely let up for a moment. Simon Pegg has a hilarious cameo, David Warner (who played a marvellous Doctor Who opposite Gatiss's oleaginous Master not so long ago) hams it up magnificently, and stop motion makes a long overdue return to the big screen in a finale that looks a million dollars. And all the way we're treated to gag after gag - from a tiny dancing devil, to a typically Leagueish take on toilet humour, to a showdown that echoes The Poseidon Adventure, the comic invention never lets up for a moment.
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