League of Gentlemen, episode 3 review: A gleefully twisted end to a glorious comeback
The humour was macabre, the horror hilarious, as phantasmagorical comedy The League of Gentlemen (BBC Two) concluded its mini revival. There were loose ends aplenty – soon to include nefarious newsagent Pop, seemingly about to be turned into stringy mince-meat after a gruesome stabbing.
The killing was presented as surreal farce, with his hallucinating, pushed-too-far son believing he had tricked Pop into turning into a hairy genie and coaxing him into a jar. Actually Pop was on the floor, his chest sloshing with blood. You laughed. It was that or scream.
Back at the tower-block and Edward and Tubbs’s pop up local shop for local people, the hostage stand-off was resolved as the authorities cancelled plans to re-draw Royston Vasey’s boundaries. The day was saved! Which was more than could be said for the captives, who’d had their faces sliced off and paper plates taped in their places.
With such gruesome japery, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson (who populate the on-screen troupe, aside from the non-acting Dyson) carved out a gory new genre in the late Nineties. Their mash- up of Twin Peaks, The Wicker Man and a half -remembered lost weekend in a creepy provincial town was unlike anything before or since in British comedy. Sketch show contemporaries such as Little Britain were no match for the Grand Guignol zaniness.
Nearly 20 years on, this signature grotesqueness has functioned as a grisly preservative. The obvious fear was that League of Gentlemen would return a creaky fossil from simpler – or sillier – times. In fact it has re-emerged coated in impregnable comedy formaldehyde. The jokes weren’t really jokes in the first place – more ghoulish twists where you expected a punchline (now there were winks, also, towards the Brexit debate and the implication that Britain was turning into one huge, barking Royston Vasey).
That queasy sensibility still has the power to shock and amuse, as demonstrated by a scene in which possessed Cousin Benjamin wrested back control of his body from the ghost of Uncle Harvey. He did so by spewing up a squishy amphibian. The sequence was stomach turning. But the actors all behaved as though they were in a Benny Hill sketch. Were you supposed to laugh? Wince while suppressing a gag? I found myself doing both simultaneously.
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Perhaps as concession to Christmas cheer, there was room for some sweetness too, with the resurrection of striving rocker Les McQueen. Now in the floor polishing business, he was reminded of his glorious past as a mid-level pop idol in a pretend Eastern European country when he got talking to a rock star customer. He was soon setting off to reclaim his place as a legend in his own tea break. It was as close as League of Gentleman came to a feel-good flourish.
A tidy resolution was obviously not on the cards. Royston Vasey might have been granted a reprieve– a phone call from the PM saw to that. No such cheerful end, however, for on-the-run Tubbs. She was sucked into the “wife mine” beneath the magical phone booth – there to be taken captive by a cameoing Papa Lazarou, the theoretically problematic blackface character nobody appears to have a problem with.
Cousin Benjamin meanwhile was saying his farewells at the train station. “You can't go back,” he told told Aunt Val. “But you can visit”. With next year’s League of Gentlemen live tour on course to be a sell-out and the cast apparently open to another series, it seems he – and all of us quivering on our couches at home – will be back in Royston Vasey sooner rather than later. The prospect is thrilling – but also slightly disquieting. Just as everyone involved would wish, you suspect.
