Reece Shearsmith & Steve Pemberton (Psychoville) Interview

Two softly-spoken family men settle down in a plush London hotel to explain the thinking behind their latest comic creation. That it involves an embittered, one-handed children's entertainer; a telekinetic dwarf in love with Snow White; a blind avaricious collector; a midwife who treats one of her practice dolls as a surrogate child; and a serial-killer-obsessed man-child, provides an immediate clue that the pair are Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton from the team that turned the grotesque into a comic art form with The League Of Gentlemen.

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The five disparate characters in Psychoville, their new murder-mystery comedy for BBC Two, are linked by receipt of letters saying, "I know what you did." Drawing on a similar style and imagination to their previous work, while being distinctive in its own right, Psychoville also in part reflects their lives as fathers of young children.


Has fatherhood been a new source of inspiration for you?

Reece: "Having young children, we're in a constant round of parties and the children's entertainer is something pertaining to our real lives. The midwife has also become big – that strange thing where dolls are dished out and you have to hold them comes from that shared experience – the horrible nature of the dolls has stuck with us."

So are you always on the look out for small foibles and potentially comic lines?

Reece: "If you go looking for it you won't find it. Something will happen, but the trick is to see if we're still laughing about it a week later."

One startling example of art imitating life in Psychoville comes with the introduction of mother and son Maureen and David...

Reece: "There's a first image where she's testing him about Jack The Ripper, while scratching his eczema back. We didn't make that up. Someone told us they went to see a friend whose mother, an amputee, was scratching her son's back with her foot. We thought if we do it with the foot no-one will believe it, so we changed it. Even so, it's a startling image and something we would otherwise never have come up with."

The inspiration for the blind collector came from Steve's student days?

Reece: "I used to read to a blind man for a charity. I thought I was going to be reading a novel, but it was boring stuff like financial reports. Sometimes, he'd give me a text book and say 'go away and put that on tape for me'. I'd come to a graph and spend ages trying to describe it, until in the end I used to just turn the page and say 'he'll never know!'"

Would you say that your writing is character led?

Reece: "We take a funny thing, work on it, and then take them out of their initial situation. We didn't really know where Psychoville was going, which was good because we could write ourselves into corners and try to get out of them in interesting and surprising ways."

You have central roles in two of the stories but, unlike The League Of Gentlemen, don't play all the parts...

Steve: "We're in every show, but we don't dominate it. We've got people like Dawn French, Daisy Haggard, Eileen Atkins and Christopher Biggins playing himself. We worked hard to make the characters fun and interesting, so they'd say 'I'd love to do that'. Being actors ourselves, we know what's going to hook them in. There are whole scenes we're not in, which is very different for us. We ended up playing four characters each, two of whom are major and two quite minor. We love doing that, and it's what we're known for, but we didn't want it to become another League Of Gentlemen. We're very keen that this is its own show."

Inevitably fans will wonder if Psychoville is the precursor to a full League Of Gentlemen reformation?

Steve: "It's still a going concern, we've never broken up, but there was a decision to have a break, during which we wrote this. It has taken two years from writing the script to getting it actually made and on TV. There's no reason why we won't go back, we're still good friends, but to do anything together would need a year and getting everyone together is tricky."

Rather than comedy, the strongest influences on Psychoville have been big American dramas such as Lost, 24 and Dexter...

Steve: "They've got us back into the serial. We wanted the audience to have to make a date with it and follow it. What inspired us was the thought that people will want to know what happens next; we've written a lot of plot and mystery, which is very exciting."

Where else have the influences that go into Psychoville come from?

Steve: "It's not really comedians or comedy shows – we prefer thrillers and horror and mundane things you wouldn't consider funny, like documentaries. It can be a moment or a feeling from a particular bit in a film. We often put together a compilation of clips, even if it's just a colour palette – 10 Rillington Place, for example, is all quite green and we wanted that feel to certain bits of Psychoville, to get that tone and put people in the right frame of mind. It's nice to have people get what we mean when we do that."

Tell us about the major online experience running alongside the show...

Steve: "We've plotted it like an extra episode. Viewers can spot website addresses each week from which they can get a lot more info. There's also a question about one of the characters, asked by the person who's blackmailing them. We thought it was an exciting way of expanding it – we weren't asked to do it, we actually sat down and wrote it. Most people won't even notice but, for those who do, we want them to feel they are investing in a whole world. We hope people do bother, otherwise it's going to sink in cyberspace!"

There's also a viral idea where viewers can sign somebody up and blackmail them...

Reece: "They get a nice blackmail video and can become part of the Psychoville experience. We're always interested in things that are fresh and this felt like something that hadn't really been explored, certainly not in this way by the creators of a show."

How do you know when you are onto something good, be it a character or a storyline?

Reece: "It ends up being me and Steve sat in a room writing - if we both laugh at it you hang onto that moment. You can't just hope to write a catchphrase, you can't come at it that way round. You hope people will be intrigued by the characters, then you've got the back story and a little bit more information comes out. On a page looking at the line-up they are really extraordinary characters – you don't get those five in a room everyday. I hope they will stick in people's minds."

Do you worry about taking things too far?

Reece: "Again, it's the wrong way round to say 'what can we think of that's going to horrify someone'. When it happens it happens, it almost surprises us that we've arrived at something odd or strange – you don't have something in mind and try to shoe-horn it in. The story takes you to the more extreme places; that's the right way round."

Steve: "We want to surprise people – not because we've done something gross or whatever – I think we have an in-built sense of the right things to do. There are some disturbing, weird images in there, but audiences like to be challenged. It's the same tone as The League Of Gentlemen, it's called Psychoville, it's on late-ish... I think they know what they're going to get."


Psychoville will air on BBC Two on Thursdays from 18th June 2009.