The mother-and-son serial-killers hide the body in a Queen Anne chest, before they're interrupted by the arrival of Chief Inspector Griffin -- played by League Of Gentlemen cohort Mark Gatiss, in a surprise guest appearance that sent a shiver of delight up my spine. With the League united on-screen for the first time since their 2005 movie, episode four proceeded to riff on Hitchcock's Rope in the manner of a dark one-act play.
While definitely a gimmick-y exercise at heart, this was nevertheless enormously entertaining and very funny. There's something incredibly arresting about television when the camera is allowed to float around actors (the set noticeably spaced to allow access around furniture), and the trio put their theatrical skills to great use. The half-hour apparently consisted of two long takes, but I didn't spot the join.
At heart, this was a one-act black-comedy in the style of Hitchcock, with the Sowerbutts forced to pose as Martin and his mother, to answer Griffin's questions about a recent spate of murders in the local area, while trying to hide the body of Martin (at one stage he ends up hung on the back of a door's coat hook), or else add the meddling Griffin to their list of victims. There were some fantastic touches liberally sprinkled about, too: the Sowerbutts dancing to a "cheering-up tape" of Black Lace's "Superman" (itself a gag, because Nietzsche's Übermensch theory was the basis for Rope's murder), to David being interrupted by a chiming clock as he was about to plunge a knife into Griffin's back (resulting in a brief tableaux of the actors.) And the dialogue contained some memorable zingers ("it was a wotsit; a Freudian clit.")
Joyous, clever, witty, intelligent and beautifully-honed black comedy. The acting, writing and staging of the episode was excellent, and the script delighted me with a clever twist halfway through. It wasn't entirely without any real purpose in the context of Psychoville itself, either, as we learned David spent time in the asylum because of his guilt over accidentally killing his father with a sleeping pill overdose -- although, by the end of this episode, David discovers his mother had been poisoning his dad months beforehand. I smell a savage cutting of the apron strings in the weeks to come, don't you?
Overall, this was a real gem. The kind of episode you can't wait to watch again and one that inspires you to get more people watching. As a League Of Gentlemen fanatic, it was wonderful to see Shearsmith, Pemberton and Gatiss together again, and the only downside to their Psychoville reunion was how quickly it passed and left me desperate for more.
9 July 2009
BBC2, 10pm
written by: Reece Shearsmith & Steve Pemberton directed by: Matt Lipsey starring: Reece Shearsmith (Maureen Sowerbutts), Steve Pemberton (Steve Pemberton), Mark Gatiss (Chief Inspector Grifffin) & David Smallbone (Martin)
