24-05-2025
Steve Pemberton interview: ‘For pure nostalgia's sake, I'd love to bring The League of Gentlemen back'
For a man who has stalked television viewers' nightmares with a string of vivid characters – including Psychoville's disturbed savant David Sowerbutts, and Tubbs 'Are you local?' Tattsyrup from The League of Gentlemen – Steve Pemberton goes gloriously unnoticed in a busy central London café.
Sausage roll in hand and sipping a white Americano in the spring sunshine, he slips seamlessly under the radar. The lunchtime crowd – a mix of tourists, office workers and lawyers from nearby Lincoln's Inn – blind to the multi-Bafta-winner in their midst. 'I do tire of the big, heavy make-ups and stuff,' he admits, low-key for our conversation in a green shirt and puffer jacket. And who can blame him, after more than 25 years contorting his features with prosthetics in the name of entertainment?
'I wouldn't want to do a Lord of the Rings trilogy and have beards, toes, ears and teeth every day for months, although I recently played Rupert Murdoch [in ITV's upcoming The Hack, a Jack Thorne drama charting the phone-hacking scandal], which was a four-hour make-up,' says the 57-year-old. 'But that was only for two days. It's nice to contrast that with something where I just play a man in middle age with my own hair.'
He does just that in the returning BBC comedy The Power of Parker, set in 1990s Stockport, about businessman Martin Parker (Conleth Hill), a silver fox juggling debts, a failed marriage and a girlfriend. After a brief but memorable turn in series one as Sandy Cooper, a Rotary Club bigwig, Pemberton – unadorned on-screen cosmetically save for some tactical augmentation to his own moustache – now gets a proper crack at the character he describes as 'a real dinosaur'.
The show was created by Paul Coleman and Sian Gibson, the latter, like Pemberton, a writer-performer, who also stars in the comedy. But why did he take this role when he must have casting directors beating a path to his door? 'I do turn a fair amount down, and with comedy I am pretty picky, but I make decisions based on how much fun I think I'm going to have, and on how good the writing is.'
The second series opens in 1992. It's a time when, in real life, Blackburn-born Pemberton was taking baby steps towards his current career. After graduating from Bretton Hall College of Education, which closed in 2007 and was also a springboard for fellow League of Gentlemen collaborators Reece Shearsmith and Mark Gatiss (fourth member Jeremy Dyson attended Leeds University), he secured a job in the London office of the US entertainment bible Variety. 'I landed on my feet. Faxes would come in and I would deliver them and make tea. After a while, they clocked that I knew quite a bit about film, so I ended up staying there for nearly 10 years.'
Out of hours, he developed a theatre company and was touring Germany when a health scare threatened to derail his fledgling career. 'I thought I had a heart problem; I just felt very under the weather, and they kept me there. I was desperate to come home, but they wouldn't let me fly. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it was a scary moment. I went on holiday to Thailand, backpacking, after that, and I thought life's too short to worry about what's going to happen.'
With that in mind, he set himself a time frame in which to succeed as a performer. 'I decided to give it until I was 30,' says Pemberton. 'I turned 30 in 1997, and that's when The League of Gentlemen won the Perrier Award.'
Their television show – which ran for three series between 1999 and 2002, returning with a trio of episodes in 2017 – spawned live gigs as well as a movie, and there's talk of taking it on the road again. 'It's when you really connect with your audience and get to feel the love,' he reflects, fresh from a sell-out West End success with a theatrical version of his BBC Two anthology series Inside No 9, alongside co-writer and performer Shearsmith.
'You don't get highs like that very often in your life. That's the closest I'll get to being Robbie Williams [Pemberton played Williams's father in the recent biopic Better Man ]. For pure nostalgia's sake, and to hang out with those guys again, I would like to do it.'
His genuine affection for the group is touching. They seem to have dodged the bitter rivalries that have rended other creative collaborations, but were there ever professional jealousies?
'I think there'll have been a tiny element of it, but, genuinely, we've all had big successes, and that's what's been fantastic. When we all get together, there isn't that band member who needs a reunion because it's never quite worked out for them.'
In 2007, Pemberton took an unexpected fork in the road, landing a regular role as Mick Garvey in the primetime ITV sitcom Benidorm, which he juggled with the black comedy Psychoville. The show lasted for 10 series and took his fanbase, not to mention his peers, by surprise.
'Benidorm came into my life out of nowhere, and a lot of people said, 'Why are you doing this?' I don't necessarily think either Reece or Mark would have done it, but it tickled me. The script was really good and I have no regrets at all. Very often things that are mainstream get pooh-poohed; they're not as culty or as cool as The League of Gentlemen, but [because of Benidorm] I would just get mobbed when I went back up north.' There's talk of a revival, but Pemberton wouldn't return. 'I'm not sure it's the sort of thing I would want to go back to, having had such a great time. You don't want to spoil that.'
Currently, he is at something of a crossroads. 'I don't think it's quite hit either of us yet,' he says of his recent decision with Shearsmith to call time on Inside No 9 following nine series. 'I never thought after The League we'd do something that got that level of love, so it's hard to think we've finished it and we have to come up with something new... or maybe we don't. I'm a bit sad, but also I'm happy and really proud that we got to end it the way we wanted.'
None the less, there was always a sense that the pair, and Shearsmith in particular, felt the award-winning show was somehow underappreciated, despite it being critically acclaimed. 'I slightly tell Reece off about that, because I think, 'How much more celebrated could it be?'' chuckles Pemberton. 'Even in the taxi home, with both of us nursing our Baftas, he's like, 'No one knows it!'' I think what he means is that it could have been on Netflix. It could have done what Black Mirror did and gone global. But, hey, we're big in China.'
Pemberton concedes they were afforded a huge amount of trust by the BBC in making the show their own way. 'It got to the point where Shane [Allen, the then head of comedy] would say, 'I don't want to read your scripts, I just want to watch them when they're finished.''
It was a different story when he adapted E F Benson's Mapp and Lucia for a three-part BBC series in 2014. 'Various times it was a case of 'You're a couple of drafts away' and I thought, what you're saying there is that what I do next isn't going to be good enough, either. You've decided it needs two more drafts. But I was working with drama people who didn't know me and I didn't know them. So it can be tough.'
For now, Inside No 9 is a closed book, save for a regional tour of the stage show that kicks off this autumn. Taking the project to the theatre has brought him another element of closure. 'We always wanted Sir Ian McKellen [on the series], because we'd had Sir Derek Jacobi, but the timing never worked out. But with the stage show, we had a different guest every evening, and on the penultimate night, Sir Ian came on. He added six minutes to the running time because he was so funny. I don't know if it was the first occasion he'd been back on stage after he'd had his accident [falling off the stage at the Noël Coward Theatre, in June 2024], but he really connects with an audience. We were in awe. So it was a lovely full-circle that he was finally part of the Inside No 9 story.'
What comes next is a mystery, even to Pemberton, who has just returned from a break in Japan. He says he's going to be prioritising more holidays in the near future. But would he ever contemplate writing a novel? 'It definitely appeals to me because I've always written, but always scripts. I love mysteries and riddles and storytelling. However, I would miss the bit when you then get to 'do' it, and you get actors in and you hang out and you tell the story. And I'd miss being with Reece. I don't know if you can write novels with two people...
'I'm a couple of years off turning 60,' he continues, 'and I'm going to a lot of birthdays, which is making me think about what the next act will be. But I've never had a plan. I've just gone with what comes up, so we'll have to see.'
