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Hello, Dave? You're our wife now.
This week we're taking a local trip for local people as The Problematic Gays head to Royston Vasey for The League of Gentlemen.
We're focusing on Series 2, Episode 2 — “Lust for Royston Vasey,” first broadcast on 21 January 2000 — and asking how one of Britain's darkest, strangest and most grotesque comedies looks more than 25 years later.
We go back to the beginnings of Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson's creation, from Bretton Hall and the Perrier Award to BBC Radio 4 and television, and explore the influences behind Royston Vasey's peculiar mixture of Hammer Horror, The Wicker Man, British sitcom and pitch-black comedy.
Then it's time to meet the locals.
There's Herr Lipp and his deeply uncomfortable interest in Justin; Tubbs and Edward facing the horrors of the outside world; Alvin attempting to escape Sunny's increasingly elaborate sexual appetites; Pauline and Mickey at the Burger Me takeaway; the deeply unpleasant Pop and his sons; Mr Chinnery doing terrible things to another unfortunate animal; and Val and Harvey's spectacularly dysfunctional household.
And then there are two characters who have become particularly complicated.
We revisit Papa Lazarou, the grotesque circus master whose appearance became central to the controversy that saw episodes removed from Netflix in 2020, and ask what the character was intended to represent versus how that imagery reads today.
We also discuss Babs, Royston Vasey's transgender taxi driver, and how a character that could once be defended as being in on the joke becomes considerably harder to defend when the programme returned in 2017.
Over in Culture Corner, we're heading back to Britain in 2000: the Millennium Dome, New Labour optimism, devolution, changing ideas of Englishness and the arrival of a little reality show called Big Brother.
And naturally, we check the charts — because nothing captures the dawn of a new millennium quite like discovering Bob the Builder at number one.
So, was The League of Gentlemen simply pushing the boundaries of turn-of-the-millennium comedy? Which jokes and characters still work brilliantly? And which parts of Royston Vasey are now problematic for very different reasons?
Despite everything, we're both giving the series a whopping 9/10.
Because this may be a local show for local people...
…but there's still nothing else quite like it.
Next time: Dynasty!
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