Weird Britannia: Ghosts and The League of Gentleman

A train pulls into a Northern Town and another stranger goes missing on the Moors…

At a glance, the opening episode of the BBC comedy series The League of Gentlemen feels like something straight out of 1970s horror, both real and imagined. The presentation of the outsider encountering the strange ‘folk’ of Royston Vasey alludes to the 1973 classic The Wicker Man but so too does the police investigation aspect from the end of the episode, a scene which stacks its references in a bid to achieve the same unsettling effect.

By this conclusion, a policeman’s body burns on the dark moors as the incestuous serial killers Tubbs and Edward ponder the arrival of more ‘strangers’ from the outside world. In this liminal space of sorts, between two different worlds, the burning of bodies becomes not merely a warning but an exorcising of impure blood.

In this regard, it is rather surprising that The League of Gentlemen is predominantly a sketch comedy series.

Royston Vasey becomes a fictional Disneyland for the darker recesses of British culture

Amidst glimmers of the disturbing, the grotesque, and the macabre, viewers are presented with slices of life in the fictional town of Royston Vasey. Like its eventual imitator, Little Britain, the show builds its foundation on sketches that showcase everyday people with their eccentricities and odd behaviours. Whilst in Little Britain this is to in some way represent the British people in a particular manner (often degrading), within The League where the eccentric meets the eerie, the effect on how the common folk are perceived is both darker and stranger: seemingly they often cross the boundary between human and monster.

Beyond the fictional, from the other side of the Pennines, this line between man and monster was notably blurred by the TV personality of Jimmy Savile whose crimes need no introduction. His particular brand of grotesque eccentricity, coupled with a perceived northern charm, goes a long way to explaining his hold over the British public and the establishment that protected and enabled him. However, it’s intriguing that The Leagues’ own brand is essentially these same two core aspects of Savile.

Whilst perhaps not a conscious effort, Savile’s invocation as an almost unidentifiable presence within the series brings closer association to his principal era of popularity, the 1970s.

Demonstrably, The League concerns itself specifically with the iconography of this decade, as with the constant hammer horror and folk horror references, but further through an underlying pastiche of the Seventies throughout.

The crimes of the 1970s play out but in a simultaneously mundane and bizarre setting

In a throwaway moment from series one, episode six, the local vicar hands out badges to passersby at a fundraiser. As another takes a badge from her, it is revealed to bear the message ‘Bring back Slavery’, with the racist image of a Golliwog in the centre. In the following episode at the start of series two, the character of Papa Lazarou is introduced, a folkloric creature that assumes the form of the blackface minstrel.

Whilst part of a longer history of racial discrimination and racist caricature, both the Golliwog and the Minstrel in Britain are firmly rooted in the 1970s, owing to the Golliwog’s discontinuation in the eighties and the cancellation of the BBC’s The Black and White Minstrel Show in 1978. For The League to present both without context or explanation is to invoke a ‘Return of the 70s’ that simply exists on its own terms like Savile’s own implied presence.

Within this faux-1970s world, devoid of any sense of either nostalgia or criticism, the grotesquerie of racism and paedophilia is ever-present; the crimes of the 1970s play out but in a simultaneously mundane and bizarre setting.  As a town, Royston Vasey becomes a fictional Disneyland for the darker recesses of British culture, a place that consists of the icons and iconography of a decade within a logically consistent setting, disguising the very sense of unreality this would seemingly provoke.

The presence, or more so spectre, of a Britain out of reach lingers on

Moreover, like something out of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet (coincidentally published during the series’ initial run from 1999-2002), the presence within of a shadowy establishment of lawyers, policemen, and the well-to-do gives the town an occult significance, the second series revolving around their unwitting release of an apocalyptic nosebleed epidemic upon Royston Vasey.

Characteristically, this is presented as unnervingly comedic, in line with the show’s brand of dark humour. Even so, less than Peace’s own prophetic imagining of a fictional paedophile ring in seventies Yorkshire, The League too retreads the path of the happenings of the Savile case in absurd, quasi-biblical fashion as the seventies casts a long, almost demonic shadow over the town just as it does over the Red Ridings’ 1980s and just as it does over Britain itself.

Above all then, The League of Gentleman is exceptional amongst its peers; whilst the comedy is an off-kilter acting out of the grotesque on the BBC, beyond this, the presence, or more so spectre, of a Britain out of reach lingers on, fashioned by its creators out of nostalgia or perhaps unconsciously but still unable to be reckoned with for years to come.

Now Savile is dead and his crimes released to the world, now the seventies have been handed judgement, The League of Gentlemen is all the more uncanny because of what is trying to get out. Now that all the pieces have come together as regards the decade, the series can be fully appreciated for its realisation of a quintessentially British horror.