TV review - Gentlemen's club seeks new members

The League of Gentlemen, BBC2

Tubbs and Edward are dead. Within moments of The League of Gentlemen’s third series roaring into monstrous life, the porcine proprietors of the Local Shop had been eviscerated by a train. There will be no more ferociously parochial suspicion, no more vicious-yet-oddly-chaste murders of hitchhikers, road-workers and other non-Local innocents. There will be no more Precious Things. Zap. Splat. Just like that. Gone, too, were the housecalls to Royston Vasey’s myriad grotesques. Instead, the episode delivered a streamlined, fuss-free narrative that focused almost entirely on Pauline, the pen-crazed Restart officer who had, when we last found ourselves up to our frightened psyches in the Gentlemen’s dark, dark world, been sent to prison for kidnapping colleague Ross.

Returning to Royston Vasey after a curtailed stay at HM Clitclink, the prodigal lesbian was met by Mickey Michaels, the child-man who would be king. Yet Pauline, it was revealed, was now working for Ross. In return for her early release from prison, she promised to spy on her badly skinned friend ("Between them," spat Ross, "Mickey and his brothers have been on the dole for 63 years"). Mickey, like Pauline, is a magnificent comic creation. White of trainer and light of brain, his every excitable, over-toothed utterance is testament to the triumph of innocence over cynicism.

Despite his pustule-riddled countenance, the mulleted naf is, perversely, a rose in a cesspool, Royston Vasey’s last bastion of genuine, unaffected happiness. He is disgusting, yet his bluff sincerity and simple-minded vulnerability renders him one of the few truly loveable League creations.

Last night we were invited into the poor sod’s home. Clutching our noses and rolling up our trouser legs, we joined Pauline and reluctantly entered. Mickey’s bedroom walls were covered in child-like drawings. His bed (single, naturally) was littered with used tissues, crisps and apple cores. Mickey invited Pauline to stay. Pauline, having nowhere else to go, accepted. Even in Royston Vasey, life, as the tour guide of the town’s caves once put it, finds a way.

As, indeed, does insight, acceptance and, we soon discovered, romance. Pauline, moved by Mickey’s vulnerability, embraced the man-monkey and rested his head on her shoulder. A passionate clinch followed. Against all odds, the lesbian and the monkey were in love. "I’m glad I could finally give you a job," said Pauline, basking in their post-coital bliss. Mickey, chomping happily on a carrot, said nothing. Naturally, their happiness was not to last. In slasher film tradition, lust was punished. Ross, furious that Pauline had betrayed him, sought revenge. They got drunk and had violent sex on the floor of his flat. But Ross’s metamorphosis from jobsworth to power-hungry misanthrope didn’t work. It may be progress, but it’s at the expense of believability and, like the shockingly blunt death of Tubbs and Edward, it lent a sour note to the first instalment of this otherwise excellent, bold new series.

Elsewhere, however, the chimes of change rang like glorious cathedral bells. Of the clutch of new grotesques, the finest was the hideously unsympathetic Dr Carlton, whose scenes served as dark relief from Pauline and Mickey’s doomed romance. Here, patients were forced to play games to win their prescriptions. A pyjama-clad bout of Grandmother’s Footsteps was ludicrously, brilliantly overwrought. Carlton, a moustachioed Crippen, held a balloon and smirked sadistically. This was Grand Guignol in a party hat. The effect was as deliciously funny as it was terrifying; the juxtaposition of childlike silliness and crypt-black humour that has always lurked at the Gentlemen’s wicked heart.

So, Tubbs and Edward are dead. But life goes on, as monstrous, horrifying and sick as ever. Long may they shock.