Things I learned from Mark Gatiss, Reece Sheersmith and Steve Pemberton last night

Future plans

22 January 2009 Rob Buckley BFI events, Events, News, UK TV 11 Comments

League of Gentlemen

I went to the League of Gentlemen In Conversation event last night at the BFI. In attendance were the full League. That might get a full write up at some point, if anyone’s interested (anyone?).

But before that, I thought I’d let you know a few juicy nuggets about their forthcoming (or not) projects, including Sherlock Holmes, Psychoville and the Lucifer Box adaptations.

Lucifer Box adaptations
Mark Gatiss spent a year developing an adaptation of his novels with the Beeb. However, it’s been abandoned because “it went the way I thought it would and became more and more neutered”. So they live no more.

Sherlock
This is his pilot for a modern day retelling of the Sherlock Holmes stories that Gatiss wrote with Stephen Moffat, and which stars Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch* as Watson and Holmes. It’s currently filming in Cardiff.

  1. Una Stubbs is playing Mrs Hudson
  2. They’re “taking taking their attitude from the Universal films of the 40s and having as much reverence [for the originals] as Conan Doyle had – none.” As proof, he referred to the stage adaptation by William Gillette who asked Doyle whether he could marry Holmes off at the end, Doyle replied “Marry him, murder him, do what you like” (more or less). All the same, they’re “looking to the real spirit of the original stories – fun, fast and strange, which we’re trying to do in Cardiff.”

Psychoville
Reece Sheersmith and Steve Pemberton’s seven part series for BBC2, inspired in part by their love of Dexter and Heroes. Will follow various people in a town or village, including a clown and a dwarf, who start to receive mysterious letters, and like Heroes this will advance the overall plot while we see them getting on with their lives. Will definitely be a comedy, but a dark one.  

Reece and Steve will be playing many of the parts, but the likes of Dawn French, Eileen Atkins, Christopher Biggins and Nicholas Le Prevost are also going to be on it. They’re editing episode five at the moment, but don’t yet know when it’s going to air.

*Rumour has it that BC was offered the role of the Doctor but turned it down because he didn’t want to follow David Tennant.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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