The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss stars in, and has written, the BBC's new Crooked House, a series of three spooky episodes that will put a chill up anybody's spine this Christmas.
The three episodes, shown over the Christmas period, depict a creaky old manor whose spooks terrify successive generations.
It all starts when a man finds a spooky-looking door knocker in his garden, and discovers that an old manor once stood where his street is now situated.
He takes it to the (creepy) curator of the local museum (Mark Gatiss) who tells him all about the history of the manor.......... The first tale he relates (which we see) is set at the manor in 1786, when an elderly gentleman buys it. After only a few days, the gentleman is awken at night by the sounds of whispering and scratching in the walls - he gets a cat in thinking it is mice.
But the mysterious sounds take a more sinister turn (including blood appearing on the walls and the awful sounds of someone choking as though being strangled by a large rope), and he discovers that the wood that built the wainscoting in the manor actually came from Tyburn's "Triple Tree" gallows, and that the spooks are the restless souls of those executed at that notorious place (this story shows that, even today, Tyburn and its dreaded "Triple Tree" gallows still cause a slight terror in the British psyche).
The next story, we fast forward 150 years to the 1920s, when young students are holding a party in the house - only to be terrified by a particularly nasty spook with its eyes gouged out.
After having these two tales related to him by the creepy curator, the man who discovered the creepy door knocker in his garden takes it home and attaches it to his front door - only for mysterious and scary happenings to take place in his home.
He takes the door knocker back to the creepy curator - only for the series to rthen end with a surprising twist in its tail!
Mark Gatiss: welcome to the dark corner of comedy
England, 1786 - Joseph Bloxham was born to live in a haunted house. Although he's a self-made man and widely deferred to, his ethics are not what they could be. Indeed he could be said to be the original rat who left the sinking ship. Trouble is, he left all his fellow rats to go down with it.
The crash of the investments Bloxham recommended hits many people very hard. Some are forced into the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison, while others take their own lives in despair, leaving families to be forced out onto the streets.
Bloxham doesn't care though. He's too busy overseeing the refurbishment of Geap Manor. His builder, Mr Coyle, has managed to find some of the finest wood for the new wainscoting in the drawing room. It seems at first that Coyle may have trapped a mouse behind the panels, but deploying a mouser to run them out does not cure the problem. Indeed, the cat will go nowhere near the wood, and runs off yowling like a banshee.
On learning of the mysterious noises emanating from the new wainscoting, Noakes pays a visit to Coyle to find out where the wood came from. Reluctantly Coyle admits it was from "all three legs" of the Tyburn Tree.
Coyle's mum, he recalls, didn't like having the timber in the house on account of her belief that it was still hungry for the taste of human blood.
Noakes rushes to the manor to warn Bloxham, but it's too late. The banging and groaning from the wood has reached deafening proportions and Bloxham, locked alone in the drawing room, is at its mercy.
Gatiss - or The Great Gatiss as he will be known in this household from now on - has made a remarkable return to an honourable British tradition with this story. In the space of half-an-hour he managed to squeeze in the establishment of the pormanteau, an allusion to the manor's history, and tell a story, and still manage to achieve a satisfyingly slow and spine-tingling build-up to the terrifying climax.
The sets were suitably dark (it was the eighteenth century after all) and atmospheric, the costumes exquisite, but the icing on the cake were the choking, strangling noises that issued forth from the panelling. Fair made my flesh creep they did.
TV Scoop: Sassy TV news, gossip and reviews. By and for people who like to watch
The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss talks to Jasper Rees about his chilling TV ghost story.
22 Dec 2008
The Telegraph
Mark Gatiss and Lee Ingleby in Crooked House
In 1786, a man with shady business ethics hears ghastly sounds in his drawing room at the manor. It turns out that the wainscoting is built of wood that was part of Tyburn's terrifying "Triple Tree" gallows
Jean Marsh as Constance and Barbara Kirby as Miss Adams in Crooked House
The League of Gentlemen, who came into being on the radio, moved to television and last year released a film, are filed in DVD outlets under comedy. But they always owed a significant debt to horror. Royston Vasey, whose signpost proclaimed that "you'll never leave", was the rural home of northern gothic. It should come as no surprise that Mark Gatiss, who has already written as well as starred in Dr Who, should turn his hand to the ghost story.
Crooked House - note the spooky lack of a definite article - is this year's seasonal attempt from the BBC to scar the bejesus out of its family audience. It tells of a creaky old manor in which successive generations are visited by ghouls. The first episode, screened last night, is set in the 18th century, the second among the flappers of the 1920s and the third brings us up to the present day. After Christmas they'll be shown again in one long film. Gatiss, who plays a slightly creepy connoisseur of the house's long history of going bump in the night, is a firm believer that in the Dickensian doctrine that Christmas is a time for scaring as well as sharing.
"Even though it's meant to be the season of jollity and goodwill," he says, "there's something delicious about the anticipation of a Christmassy ghost thrill." He has done a lifelong study of this, having first been allowed by amazingly laissez-faire parents to watch Brides of Dracula at the age of four. An addiction was born.
"It left an indelible impression. Fear is an underrated emotion. And that's why I think it's very dangerous to try and cosset children from it. A healthy scare is as good as as a healthy laugh. In fact they're two sides of the same coin. There is a desire to shield from the knocks and bumps of reality. It's a short step from not letting children play outside to not letting them imagine a world in which people die. Children are naturally bloodthirsty. They understand things in very black and white terms. One of the pleasures of the original Grimm's Fairy Tales is how incredibly ghastly they are. The ugly sisters have their eyes pecked out by crows."
It was for these reasons, as well as indelible memories of watching Jon Pertwee battle Daleks and Cybermen in the early 1790s, that Gatiss would pin BBC executives against the wall at parties and urge them to exhume Doctor Who. When he was subsequently invited to write an episode, the one starring Dickens and an old lady zombie, Gatiss was summoned onto Radio Four's PM to answer complaints that his story was just too scary.
"I said, 'I'm absolutely over the moon, because that's what Doctor Who did to me as a kid and that's why I'm here talking to you.'" Gatiss also grew up with an addiction to the BBC's adaptations of MR James's Edwardian ghost stories, and early on developed a fondness for portmanteau films structured like Crooked House as a multiple narrative.
"They always have a tongue-in-cheek quality. I feel very strongly that the scares do become a lot stronger if you've actually enjoyed yourself, if you care about the characters and have a laugh with them." Hence in particular the party atmosphere in the second of the Crooked Hand films. He cites The Exorcist III as an underrated example. "The first twenty minutes are quite gaggy." As for the League of Gentlemen, who initially bonded over their love of horror, they often saw the funny side of films originally intended to chill to the bone.
"Some of the films that we have watched to death you end up finding funnier rather than scary because you're so familiar with them. The Wicker Man is a brilliant film but we became briefly obsessed with this bit at the end where they're singing 'Summer Is A-Coming In' and there's this actor called Aubrey Morris who either hasn't learnt the dance properly or it's just a bit cold on the clifftop and he's slightly out of time."
The League for the moment is in abeyance. Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are working on a film called Psychobill, while Gatiss has had other irons in the fire.
In his widening portfolio of activities, Gatiss recently saw the third in the Lucifer Box trilogy of historical spy novels published, and last year he played Agrado, the adorable transvestite in the Old Vic's stage account of All About My Mother.
"I know Pedro Almodovar was very keen that whoever did it was gay. He wanted it to be authentic. I think that's quite legitimate. But I always want people not to be pigeonholed. I was offered three plays after All About My Mother, all drag. I thought if I do that, I'll be finished. I'll literally become the nation's favourite transvestite."
He'd make a marvellous pantomime dame. But a life in dresses would have given him no time to pursue his fascination for the ancient. Growing up in the north-east, Gatiss attended "a run down 70s comp in a post-war new town where the walls were so thin you could punch holes in them". His love for all things old was nurtured not only by ghost stories, but by dreams of dreaming spires and solitary roaming round Durham Cathedral.
In another love letter to a sepia-tinted yesteryear, for BBC4 he wrote and starred in an adaptation of Apsley Cherry Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World - a different sort of Edwardian horror story. A celebrity-obsessed apparatchik at the BBC had to be persuaded out of giving the first ever dramatised version of the greatest travel book ever written the new name of Mark Gatiss and the Penguin's Eggs.
"The book is the weirdest combination of stoicism and folly. It's something so intensely English which of course the MR James ghost stories are as well. It was the almost hair-shirt approach of willingly grasping this horrible journey and not in any way complaining about it. Oddly enough my only other ambition was to be an explorer/palaeontologist, but I didn't have the Latin. Or the chemistry. Or the legs."
telegraph.co.uk
The three episodes, shown over the Christmas period, depict a creaky old manor whose spooks terrify successive generations.
It all starts when a man finds a spooky-looking door knocker in his garden, and discovers that an old manor once stood where his street is now situated.
He takes it to the (creepy) curator of the local museum (Mark Gatiss) who tells him all about the history of the manor.......... The first tale he relates (which we see) is set at the manor in 1786, when an elderly gentleman buys it. After only a few days, the gentleman is awken at night by the sounds of whispering and scratching in the walls - he gets a cat in thinking it is mice.
But the mysterious sounds take a more sinister turn (including blood appearing on the walls and the awful sounds of someone choking as though being strangled by a large rope), and he discovers that the wood that built the wainscoting in the manor actually came from Tyburn's "Triple Tree" gallows, and that the spooks are the restless souls of those executed at that notorious place (this story shows that, even today, Tyburn and its dreaded "Triple Tree" gallows still cause a slight terror in the British psyche).
The next story, we fast forward 150 years to the 1920s, when young students are holding a party in the house - only to be terrified by a particularly nasty spook with its eyes gouged out.
After having these two tales related to him by the creepy curator, the man who discovered the creepy door knocker in his garden takes it home and attaches it to his front door - only for mysterious and scary happenings to take place in his home.
He takes the door knocker back to the creepy curator - only for the series to rthen end with a surprising twist in its tail!
Mark Gatiss: welcome to the dark corner of comedy
England, 1786 - Joseph Bloxham was born to live in a haunted house. Although he's a self-made man and widely deferred to, his ethics are not what they could be. Indeed he could be said to be the original rat who left the sinking ship. Trouble is, he left all his fellow rats to go down with it.
The crash of the investments Bloxham recommended hits many people very hard. Some are forced into the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison, while others take their own lives in despair, leaving families to be forced out onto the streets.
Bloxham doesn't care though. He's too busy overseeing the refurbishment of Geap Manor. His builder, Mr Coyle, has managed to find some of the finest wood for the new wainscoting in the drawing room. It seems at first that Coyle may have trapped a mouse behind the panels, but deploying a mouser to run them out does not cure the problem. Indeed, the cat will go nowhere near the wood, and runs off yowling like a banshee.
On learning of the mysterious noises emanating from the new wainscoting, Noakes pays a visit to Coyle to find out where the wood came from. Reluctantly Coyle admits it was from "all three legs" of the Tyburn Tree.
Coyle's mum, he recalls, didn't like having the timber in the house on account of her belief that it was still hungry for the taste of human blood.
Noakes rushes to the manor to warn Bloxham, but it's too late. The banging and groaning from the wood has reached deafening proportions and Bloxham, locked alone in the drawing room, is at its mercy.
Gatiss - or The Great Gatiss as he will be known in this household from now on - has made a remarkable return to an honourable British tradition with this story. In the space of half-an-hour he managed to squeeze in the establishment of the pormanteau, an allusion to the manor's history, and tell a story, and still manage to achieve a satisfyingly slow and spine-tingling build-up to the terrifying climax.
The sets were suitably dark (it was the eighteenth century after all) and atmospheric, the costumes exquisite, but the icing on the cake were the choking, strangling noises that issued forth from the panelling. Fair made my flesh creep they did.
TV Scoop: Sassy TV news, gossip and reviews. By and for people who like to watch
The League of Gentlemen's Mark Gatiss talks to Jasper Rees about his chilling TV ghost story.
22 Dec 2008
The Telegraph
Mark Gatiss and Lee Ingleby in Crooked House
In 1786, a man with shady business ethics hears ghastly sounds in his drawing room at the manor. It turns out that the wainscoting is built of wood that was part of Tyburn's terrifying "Triple Tree" gallows
Jean Marsh as Constance and Barbara Kirby as Miss Adams in Crooked House
The League of Gentlemen, who came into being on the radio, moved to television and last year released a film, are filed in DVD outlets under comedy. But they always owed a significant debt to horror. Royston Vasey, whose signpost proclaimed that "you'll never leave", was the rural home of northern gothic. It should come as no surprise that Mark Gatiss, who has already written as well as starred in Dr Who, should turn his hand to the ghost story.
Crooked House - note the spooky lack of a definite article - is this year's seasonal attempt from the BBC to scar the bejesus out of its family audience. It tells of a creaky old manor in which successive generations are visited by ghouls. The first episode, screened last night, is set in the 18th century, the second among the flappers of the 1920s and the third brings us up to the present day. After Christmas they'll be shown again in one long film. Gatiss, who plays a slightly creepy connoisseur of the house's long history of going bump in the night, is a firm believer that in the Dickensian doctrine that Christmas is a time for scaring as well as sharing.
"Even though it's meant to be the season of jollity and goodwill," he says, "there's something delicious about the anticipation of a Christmassy ghost thrill." He has done a lifelong study of this, having first been allowed by amazingly laissez-faire parents to watch Brides of Dracula at the age of four. An addiction was born.
"It left an indelible impression. Fear is an underrated emotion. And that's why I think it's very dangerous to try and cosset children from it. A healthy scare is as good as as a healthy laugh. In fact they're two sides of the same coin. There is a desire to shield from the knocks and bumps of reality. It's a short step from not letting children play outside to not letting them imagine a world in which people die. Children are naturally bloodthirsty. They understand things in very black and white terms. One of the pleasures of the original Grimm's Fairy Tales is how incredibly ghastly they are. The ugly sisters have their eyes pecked out by crows."
It was for these reasons, as well as indelible memories of watching Jon Pertwee battle Daleks and Cybermen in the early 1790s, that Gatiss would pin BBC executives against the wall at parties and urge them to exhume Doctor Who. When he was subsequently invited to write an episode, the one starring Dickens and an old lady zombie, Gatiss was summoned onto Radio Four's PM to answer complaints that his story was just too scary.
"I said, 'I'm absolutely over the moon, because that's what Doctor Who did to me as a kid and that's why I'm here talking to you.'" Gatiss also grew up with an addiction to the BBC's adaptations of MR James's Edwardian ghost stories, and early on developed a fondness for portmanteau films structured like Crooked House as a multiple narrative.
"They always have a tongue-in-cheek quality. I feel very strongly that the scares do become a lot stronger if you've actually enjoyed yourself, if you care about the characters and have a laugh with them." Hence in particular the party atmosphere in the second of the Crooked Hand films. He cites The Exorcist III as an underrated example. "The first twenty minutes are quite gaggy." As for the League of Gentlemen, who initially bonded over their love of horror, they often saw the funny side of films originally intended to chill to the bone.
"Some of the films that we have watched to death you end up finding funnier rather than scary because you're so familiar with them. The Wicker Man is a brilliant film but we became briefly obsessed with this bit at the end where they're singing 'Summer Is A-Coming In' and there's this actor called Aubrey Morris who either hasn't learnt the dance properly or it's just a bit cold on the clifftop and he's slightly out of time."
The League for the moment is in abeyance. Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are working on a film called Psychobill, while Gatiss has had other irons in the fire.
In his widening portfolio of activities, Gatiss recently saw the third in the Lucifer Box trilogy of historical spy novels published, and last year he played Agrado, the adorable transvestite in the Old Vic's stage account of All About My Mother.
"I know Pedro Almodovar was very keen that whoever did it was gay. He wanted it to be authentic. I think that's quite legitimate. But I always want people not to be pigeonholed. I was offered three plays after All About My Mother, all drag. I thought if I do that, I'll be finished. I'll literally become the nation's favourite transvestite."
He'd make a marvellous pantomime dame. But a life in dresses would have given him no time to pursue his fascination for the ancient. Growing up in the north-east, Gatiss attended "a run down 70s comp in a post-war new town where the walls were so thin you could punch holes in them". His love for all things old was nurtured not only by ghost stories, but by dreams of dreaming spires and solitary roaming round Durham Cathedral.
In another love letter to a sepia-tinted yesteryear, for BBC4 he wrote and starred in an adaptation of Apsley Cherry Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World - a different sort of Edwardian horror story. A celebrity-obsessed apparatchik at the BBC had to be persuaded out of giving the first ever dramatised version of the greatest travel book ever written the new name of Mark Gatiss and the Penguin's Eggs.
"The book is the weirdest combination of stoicism and folly. It's something so intensely English which of course the MR James ghost stories are as well. It was the almost hair-shirt approach of willingly grasping this horrible journey and not in any way complaining about it. Oddly enough my only other ambition was to be an explorer/palaeontologist, but I didn't have the Latin. Or the chemistry. Or the legs."
telegraph.co.uk
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