‘We will all be dust soon’: Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss on death and drama

You assume that the people behind macabre television classics are made of stern stuff. But, halfway through our conversation, Mark Gatiss lowers his voice and his sandwich, and allows himself to fall into despair.

“My husband asked me not to say it, but I’m going to say it,” whispers the man who co-created the BBC’s League of Gentlemen and Sherlock . “I am so, so depressed about the state of the world that it is physically affecting.

“I feel slightly hemmed in,” he goes on. “Things like the destruction of Palmyra by Isis physically affected me. I cannot bear an assault on history, I can’t bear it. And now that’s hand in hand with an assault on science and reason.”

Gatiss takes off his glasses, and starts pinching his nose. “I’m just — I’m just really scared. I’m scared we’re not going to make it. Genuinely — for the first time in my life. The lunatics have genuinely taken over. Everywhere . . . I’m trying to find a way of engaging with it, without becoming prostrate with depression.”

This is London in 2017, where even over afternoon tea at the National Portrait Gallery — perhaps especially over afternoon tea at the National Portrait Gallery — existential anxiety is never far from the surface. Where even those who specialise in alternate realities keep getting dragged back to the original. Imagine devising TV dramas seen by hundreds of millions of people, and still feeling on the losing side of a culture war. 

In the arts world at least, Gatiss, 51, has triumphed. It is 20 years since, as part of The League of Gentlemen, a comedy quartet specialising in broken dreams and bodily fluids, he won the Edinburgh Festival’s Perrier award. Since then he has managed to excel both as a writer and an actor. With his close collaborator Steven Moffat, Gatiss has resuscitated two of Britain’s best-loved characters — Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes. There have also been novels, documentaries, radio and theatre.

As an actor, you would think he was born to play puppet masters — the scheming brother Mycroft Holmes in Sherlock, Peter Mandelson in Coalition and Robert Cecil in Gunpowder — until you remember what a prize idiot he was as Mickey in The League of Gentlemen.

He can play weak or strong; historical or surreal; straight or gay; comic or serious. “I want to do as many different things as possible,” he says, adding later: “It’s called range, love.”

Recently, he was sent a script advertised as containing a “very Mark Gatiss part”. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right’, because that means they’ve made up their minds what I do, and I don’t want to be like that.” Here is a man who clearly takes pleasure in saying yes, and pleasure in saying no.

Today his range includes both despair and nonchalance. Gatiss finishes his monologue about the laws against homosexuality around the world (“unbelievable”), the continued existence of flat-earthers (“what has happened to us?”), and the fate of modern-day America (“maybe the corpse of the world”), and returns to a more familiar breeziness. “I’m not a tortured comedian. I am by nature very optimistic,” he insists. 

The Portrait Gallery is his favourite place in London, a spot for “spiritual sustenance”. He loves painting (his only hobby “apart from fossil-hunting”); he loves linking the past and the present. “People can have extremely modern faces in a very old picture,” he says. “The great revelation of this place is that William Hogarth looks exactly like [tough-guy actor] Ross Kemp.”

Gatiss cuts a poised figure, like the Victorian gentleman he romanticises, but is also animated and talkative. “I’ve had a lot of loss in my life,” he says at one point. “I get very impatient with trivia. I can’t — I really can’t be bothered with so many things. Because we literally will all be dust soon. Perhaps sooner than we think. We don’t have long. So why don’t we just get on with it?”

Death is the theme that flows through Gatiss’s work — a source of comedy, mystery and fear. It was a youthful obsession. He spent nights watching horror films made for adults; he grew up opposite a mental hospital; his mother described him as a “very morbid child”. Yet his childhood, in a working class family in Darlington, in north-east England, was happy. Did that make it easier for him to fantasise about blood and gore? “I think it’s just taste,” he says. “I just don’t think it’s about anything as prescriptive as that.”

The deaths of his mother and his sister in recent years have changed him. “I’ve always loved ghosts — that scare, that thrill — more than body horror. But I used to have a much higher threshold than I do now. I’m hopeless now.” Even so he has just directed a Dracula radio play.

With the security of success, he describes himself as “thick as shit”. He never considered Oxbridge (“I like the idea of it, in a Brideshead-y kind of way, but I absolutely couldn’t have gone”), and was rejected by Drama Centre London, a school nicknamed Trauma Centre for its unsparing auditions. “I remember getting on the Tube at Chalk Farm thinking if I don’t pull myself out of this, I’ll never do it. And I did: I pulled myself up. It was a scary moment.”

In the mid-1980s, he ended up at a “terrible” drama school in rural Yorkshire, where he met Jeremy Dyson, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, the other members of the League of Gentlemen. The school’s “absence of a coherent policy meant we became extremely self-reliant. By the time we left, we were quite resilient and very good at making our own stuff.”

The group was bound together by the four men’s knowledge of northern English eccentricities. Its selling point to audiences was “good value for money” — not running out of material in the last 20 minutes, like other live comedy groups they saw.

It took six years for them to be commissioned by the BBC — first on radio, then television. In the meantime, Gatiss spent a short time working on a cartoon show starring Rolf Harris, the artist who served three years after being convicted in 2014 of indecent assaults. “They didn’t have enough people to answer his fan mail. We used to forge his signature.”

Alan Bennett, one of Gatiss’s heroes, delighted in The League of Gentlemen because it was “so silly”. The setting was a Peak District village with dozens of characters, including two shopkeepers who butcher their customers, a circus master who abducts women and a grandfather who insists on 20 dress rehearsals of his own funeral. Many fans still howl at the catchphrases — “A local shop for local people”; “We didn’t burn him!”; “Hello, Dave?”.

The ghoulishness wasn’t to everyone’s taste. “I used to get slightly cross about people saying, ‘I can’t watch that, it’s too dark.’ Then I watched it and thought, ‘Jesus Christ, they’re absolutely right.’ Some of it is extraordinarily bleak.” It was heavily pixelated when broadcast in the US.

The League has been off-air since 2002 but is returning for three Christmas specials. Watching old episodes today, some of the characters can grate. A transsexual is mercilessly mocked; at least three women (played by men) are reduced to their inability to have children. Similarly, Sherlock has been criticised for failing to develop female characters; this Christmas, Jodie Whittaker will be the first woman to play Doctor Who, after 12 men. Gatiss is part aware, part unapologetic. “We’re obviously a lot more sensitive to all kinds of things, particularly trans issues. I think I read the other day that the percentage of female roles in films is the same as it was in 1911. Which is just extraordinary. I would love to write more for women, and . . . The problem is you might feel slightly hidebound by what people demand that you do. I don’t want to think, ‘It should probably be a woman.’

“The industry is, as we know, inherently sexist. There is a cut-off point for actresses, which appears to be now 23 when they’re deemed too old and they have to wait until they’re playing Lady Bracknell. I think there should have been a female Doctor Who a long time ago.” So why wasn’t there? He hesitates. “Up to a certain point in its history, it would have felt a bit like a novelty.” 

Like Robbie Williams in Take That, Gatiss wasn’t necessarily the member of the League that you would have immediately picked to go on to greater things. Shearsmith and Pemberton provided the most memorable images of the show when they Sellotaped their noses upwards. Gattis’s face did not lend itself to physical comedy so naturally. Nor were his scenes — written with Dyson — as gothic or quotable as those of the other pair. “Our stuff was always quite low-key and tragicomic,” he says.

Gatiss insists that what has allowed him to thrive is a focus on character. He was inspired by Alan Bennett, Michael Palin, Victoria Wood, Steve Coogan and James Bond.

The contemporary version of Sherlock that he and Moffat launched in 2010, to modest expectations, is “two men sharing a flat” — an unlikely friendship between the detective and John Watson. Holmes is “not a superhero”, he’s “someone with a superpower you can believe you can have yourself. Because I did. I used to go on the school bus and try and deduce things.”

There is something effortless about Gatiss. Sherlock and Doctor Who are the two BBC dramas that sell best overseas but he shrugs at the idea that there is a burden to big franchises. “People get very didactic — they tell you that you have to do something. And you think, ‘No we don’t.’”

Others might be distracted by fans who scribble plot suggestions in online forums but not him. “I literally don’t have time to read my own stuff, let alone anybody else’s,” he says. “People write this incredibly creative stuff, but I have to send it back, because, in 10 years, if I write something that has the same idea, they’ll sue,” he adds. “Mostly I just want to say to people, ‘By all means be very creative, and do what you like with it, but this is us doing this or me doing this.’ It’s not a democracy.”

He exudes confidence in his own choices. He’s not interested in a move to Hollywood (“I love going to LA, but that’s because I’ve never worked there”) or in HBO budgets. Queers, a collection of BBC monologues to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts, was “the happiest I’ve been in for ever because it was so cheap. The restrictions can really, really sharpen your wits.” Doesn’t he yearn for one mega hit, say a horror film? “Absolutely not. There’s a hole inside you that can never be filled if you think that way. You get to the top of the mountain and you realise there’s nothing there.”

I note that nothing seems to perturb him. And it is at this point that, almost to prove me wrong, he collapses into political pessimism. His despair is so deeply felt that I ask if he has seen a therapist. “Not today, no,” he flicks back, jovially, before pausing. “When my mum died, I did for a while. That’s the only time I’ve seen one.”

Nonetheless, Gatiss seems fascinated by characters for whom mental instability is a permanent feature. He is due to play George III on stage next year. In Sherlock, Holmes’s superpower appears to be borderline Asperger’s. “I don’t think it’s a disorder,” says Gatiss, of the detective, defensively. “You can read Conan Doyle and think he is — you can diagnose him. Clearly that is based on people who have manic mood swings. We made Mycroft the Niles to Sherlock’s Frasier, who apparently feels nothing — though of course he does, he just keeps it all under control.”

The reference to the US sitcom Frasier, which ended in 2004, is about as modern as Gatiss gets. Otherwise he name-checks The Seventh Seal (1957), Threads (1984), Battlefield Earth (2000). He and his husband, the actor Ian Hallard, have just finished watching Dallas (1978-1991). His favourite channel is Talking Pictures TV, which is mostly black-and-white. “It’s like being off school permanently,” he jokes. 

Does he hope his own creations will endure beyond his lifetime? “It will all be forgotten. It doesn’t matter, does it? For us, the brilliant thing about Sherlock’s success is that it’s pointed people back to Doyle. I got involved with the campaign to save one of Conan Doyle’s houses, and I remember Steve Moffat saying to me, ‘Why does he need a house, he’s dead?’”

Reviewers have speculated about whether Sherlock has come to a natural end, its plot lines now beyond credibility. Will there be another series? “Dunno. Honestly. It’s the first time we haven’t had plans for 18 months down the line.” The last episode was, he says, both “a possible natural ending, and a possible natural place for them to do another one.”

In 2019, he and Moffat will bring Dracula to BBC TV — a possible replacement franchise, and a return to the goriness of Gatiss’s childhood. “You’d sort of imagine in the dangerous times we live in that people wouldn’t be interested [in horror], but they very much are. The great Hollywood horror boom was at the height of the Depression.”

Our afternoon tea stand is only half-finished — a miniature Victoria sponge untouched on top — but time is running out. Gatiss recognises someone at the door to the restaurant, a frail figure in a wheelchair, wearing a beanie. It’s Ian Holm, the 86-year-old actor who just three years ago was appearing as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit films. “He was brilliant,” says Gatiss, transfixed.

Human mortality can be troubling in the flesh. But on the screen, in the right hands, it glistens. 

This article was amended to reflect that Rolf Harris served three years in prison for indecent assaults but was released in May 2017

‘The League of Gentlemen’ and ‘Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time’ will air on the BBC in December.

Henry Mance is an FT political correspondent and was Interviewer of the Year at the British Press Awards

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Portraits by Lola & Pani