In Praise of Mark Gatiss

I like Mark Gatiss. There. Said it.

Never gonna happen, Mark. Never gonna happen. 

I like to think that Mark and I could have been friends if we’d ever actually met. I have a lot of time for the things he’s done: I’ve got all of The League of Gentleman’s stuff, the Sherlock stuff, the cameos in Jekyll and Being Human and even the episode of Marple where he plays a baddie vicar. I’m no stalking super-fan but I know my way around his oeuvre. His A History of Horror, with Jonathan Rigby was excellent and I even enjoyed his fabulously static and indulgent tete a tete with Matthew Sweet on Who was the best Bond even though it was a televised pub chat without the beer-mat flipping but with two Moss Bros tuxedos.  And even though he picked the wrong Bond.

So I’m a fan. I’m not about to install myself in his air-conditioning ducts, creeping out in the night to smell his hair while he sleeps (though it would be pretty easy as most of it’s in the plughole). But I have long admired his work. 

As, indeed, did a lot of other people. But did you notice something there? Did. I used the past tense. Because lately the brickbats have been flying like actual bats, but more mineral based and oblong. Ruddier. Gatiss has been pilloried on those all important fan-sites for his consistently weak Dr Who episodes, for his, ahem, mannered performance in Taboo but mostly for his writing on the recent series of Sherlock. There has been a hell of a lot of Gatiss bashing about: the intermittently amusing satirical website “Newsthump” released a missing persons report, suggesting he’d been ingested by his own fundament, and John Tatlock, writing in “The Quietus”, eviscerated the series (though I can’t imagine any work of art withstanding this level of withering, pedantic close scrutiny. “Call that a “David” Michaelangelo? You didn’t even dot the eyes!)

And they were right: that last episode in particular made virtually no sense: Sherlock and John leap from an exploding second floor flat onto the street below and appear, apparently unscathed, commandeering a trawler! What? The two cleverest men in all the world are standing in front of an unexploded grenade and their best plan is to jump out of a window? This represents another unwelcome trend in the programme: Sherlock’s gradual thickening. In the first series he was incandescently smart. It was his U.S.P. Sherlock = clever. The only person cleverer than him was his brother Mycroft, a shimmering Paraclete, but resentful and alien. That’s fine. That’s canon. That’s what you want.

By the end of the last series Sherlock’s well down the intellectual pecking order. His sister and his brother are both cleverer than he is. Moriarty certainly seems to be, as he doesn’t even need to be alive to repeatedly kick his arse. Mary Watson and Sherlock’s mum are both geniuses. I think that makes him about sixth. Increasingly Sherlock looks as though he is bright but lazy, slumming it with John and Greg at the back of the class as he can’t hack it in the top stream.      

And then there was that last episode of Dracula...

But I’ve come here to praise Mark Gatiss not bury him in the same shite that everybody else has. Here are some great things that Mark Gatiss has done:

The League of Gentlemen.

There’s not much I need to say here except almost everything I have ever written for the theatre (and even some of the short stories I’ve written) bears the sticky and dubious fingerprints of The League of Gentlemen. Their sensibility is heartening: they aren’t afraid to be clever but they have a streak of vulgarity a mile wide. They like obscure, peculiar things (Robert Aickman, long forgotten documentaries, and conversations with their landlords) and mine them for comic gold. They seem as bemused as I am that people are willing to go along with their idée fixes! My favourite bits that Gatiss has contributed to the League are the Mooncat collared reluctant swinger Alvin, Glam rock hospital porter Les (“Its smells like a cacky nappy in here!”) and Mick the short -shorted cave guide who is haunted by disasters past. There are no jokes here and Gatiss plays it perfectly straight, daring us to laugh. Oh, and the way his Legz Akimbo actor Phil Proctor (they have great names!) allows his Geordie accent to slip on the word “cigarettes” in “No Home 4 Johnny” is an exquisite moment!  

The Book of Precious Things.

Cashing in on the flowering of their success, the League published a book detailing their comic influences. Unlike a lot of modern comedians who are as cannibalistic as they are tediously encyclopaedic,  the League draw almost all of their inspiration from outside the comic arena, and Gatiss is no exception. His picks are varied: Doctor Who is included, but of course, (particularly the writing of Robert Holmes) and there’s also Mike Leigh’s “Nuts in May”, the Rufus Wainwright song “Dinner at Eight”, and the sublime sit-com “Porridge”, and excerpts from each are included. All four members of the League offer up morsels for your delight and delectation, and it really works as a fantastically dippable primer for their mysterious world.   

His farting would–be thesp in “Psychoville”.

In the fourth episode of ex-Leaguers Pemberton and Shearsmith’s character comedy, murder obsessed man-child David Sowerbutts (Steve Pemberton) and his mum, Maureen (Reece Shearsmith), the bon tempi loving brains behind the operation, are murdering a man they think is blackmailing them. Unfortunately, an Inspector calls. It is Gatiss, in Scotland Yard motley, sniffing out corpses in this loving tribute to Hitchcock’s “Rope”. Later Gatiss reveals himself to be a bank clerk who thought he was auditioning for a Murder Mystery and can’t stop dropping his guts (“It stinks!”). But by then it is too late – he has to die. Gatiss is great here in a half hour three hander, but more importantly it gave Pemberton and Shearsmith the idea to drop the tedious series long arcs they felt they had to deploy on Psychoville and invent the one-off plays for today of Inside No. 9.     

The commentary on the Blood on Satan’s Claw DVD.

 I’m the sort of unrelenting saddo who listens to the commentaries on early seventies folk horror classics. Luckily the League of Gentlemen are the sort of saddos who actually do them (though they do at least get paid). The commentary here is funny, companionable, endlessly diverting (and diverted) and nerdily informative, and that nerdy information is all down to Gatiss. He is the natural authority on the subject and appears to know even more obscure tosh about British horror portmanteaus (and Blood on Satan’s Claw very nearly was one, as Gatiss reveals) than I do. And I’m a BORE on the subject! The rest of the League defer to him naturally as he is the tallest.

When he first made money he built a wood panelled Victorian scientific lab in his flat. And if he didn’t he told people he did so that credulous gits like me would believe it. Which is almost better.

Mr Snow.

You want mannered? You want a rolling, droll delivery. You want the campest manifestation of undiluted evil since Peter O’ Toole’s turn as Tiberius in Tinto Brass’ Caligula? You want skin like blue brie? You’re so veiny you probably think this post is about you. And it is, if you’re Mark Gatiss. Gatiss’ Mr. Snow, from Being Human, is a refined and decadent Hilary Briss, bored by centuries of easy deaths and tedious carnage, forever suppressing a yawn, always on the brink of rolling his eyes. He is a man, of sorts, who is truly jaded about immortality and desperate for one final thrill. To say that, ultimately, he gets it is not to give too much away. I love Gatiss in this, the ennui, the purr, the slowness – it’s the part he was born to play!  

Crooked House.

Desperate to bring back the “ghost story at Christmas” that he remembered from his childhood Gatiss only went and wrote one himself. And killing two birds with one stone it’s a portmanteau horror as well. Crooked House is the story of magic doorknocker, a necromancer by the name of Unthank and the Crooked House itself “Geap Manor”, an “unquiet” residence. Put like that it sounds a bit shit – I’ve never been great on loglines – but luckily it’s not. Its camp as Christmas, fittingly, but also contains genuinely scary moments. The first episode, a ghost story based around the South Sea Bubble, is particularly effective and, while it pilfers freely from Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, it’s none the worse for that.     

The Man in Black. 

The radio anthology series The Man in Black has a long and august history, tracing its routes back to Appointment with Fear in 1943, when The Man in Black had the unmistakable, stentorian tones of Valentine Dyall. In the eighties he was portrayed by the suave and urbane Edward de Souza. Both of these interpretations are of the old school: trained, actorly voices at the bum-quaking end of the sonic spectrum. Gatiss interpretation, when the series was reintroduced to Radio 4 Extra in 2009, is markedly different. He is smoky, oily, and insistent. He insinuates – there is a sardonic smile paired with each utterance. Regardless of the story he is telling you, you are implicated in it. This is not a passive listening experience – on Gatiss’ watch the story is happening to you, like a bad future memory.