Mark Gatiss is running an hour late for our lunch, but I can forgive him. He seems to have so much on. The co-creator and writer of Sherlock (he also played a beady-eyed Mycroft) has not long finished production on a new incarnation of Dracula, a revamp which will be a headline act of BBC schedules next year. That morning he’s been making the finishing edits to voiceovers for a Bram Stoker documentary that will go out alongside the drama series. He has also devised and directed a Christmas ghost story – an adaptation of MR James’s tale, Martin’s Close, which pitches Peter Capaldi into the 17th-century courtroom of “Hanging Judge” Jeffreys. Add in last year’s sell-out tour of the regathered League of Gentlemen, and his long stint as writer on the revived Doctor Who, and you have a sense of Gatiss, at 53, as a sort of one-man Gothic cottage industry, marshalling a production line of brilliantly knowing grotesques, injecting fresh blood into fireside stories.
I wait for him with a beer in the Duke of Cambridge, the organic foodie pub that is his local in Islington (it comes as no surprise to discover that his house around the corner features a Victorian laboratory with cabinets of curiosities). It’s a windy old November afternoon starting to lose its light. I half expect Gatiss to swing through the saloon doors in a cape and a gust of autumn leaves. When he arrives, tall and carefully elegant and grinning and apologising, the best he can offer by way of horrors are ghoulish scrolled photos of himself tricked up as Jacob Rees-Mogg for a Halloween party. “I had some ‘dead pallor’ makeup which was perfect,” he says, of his pinstriped Mr Hyde. “The only problem was several people wanted to punch me.”
He’s a regular enough visitor here, often with his husband, the actor Ian Hallard, to know what he wants; in case the kitchen closes he’s ordered ahead for a bowl of cannellini bean stew that comes with a hunk of bread and harissa and a rich broth. Sitting down, he notes how the pub is only a few doors down the road from the house in which Joe Orton lived and died. Gatiss is, by coincidence, off up to Leicester later in the week for an auction to raise money for an Orton statue in the writer’s home city. He has his eye on a couple of facsimiles of those infamous defaced Islington library books from Orton’s indecency trial. “Some of the best filthy comic writing in history,” he says, with his joyful hoot of a laugh.
Gatiss seems to have been born for his current vocation. He grew up in Sedgefield, County Durham, in a house opposite an Edwardian asylum, the son of a mining engineer. He was raised on a diet of Alan Bennett and Ripping Yarns and is exhibit A in the power of books to shape a child’s imagination (he loves that Bennett idea of an author’s welcoming hand reaching out from a book and taking yours). Aged five or six and already beginning to be immersed in the Doctor Who stories and Willard Price’s adventure series, he was chosen for special lessons as an advanced reader with Mrs Wiggington at Heighington C of E school. He recalls being awarded a house point for knowing the word “subterranean”. Someone gave him a copy of Great Expectations one Christmas soon after and he was away. “I owe that book an awful lot,” he says. “When the plot twist about Magwitch came, I remember my jaw literally dropping open. I still absolutely love it, it’s so full of terror and humanity.”
That latter double act, in different comic guises, has been the staple of Gatiss’s writing since he first met Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton at drama school in Yorkshire and they formed The League of Gentlemen. They were on the road with a stage show for a few years before being offered a radio slot and then a TV series by the BBC in 1999. Even then, his family weren’t convinced it was a proper career. “I remember my parents coming down to stay in London in about 2000,” he says. “Ronnie Corbett strangely was a very early fan of The League of Gentlemen – he came to our show in Edinburgh. I mentioned that to my mum and she said: ‘Well, surely he can do something to help you.’ I said, ‘Mum, it’s all right, we’ve got our own TV show now.’” He laughs. “She was always on at me to learn golf, because that is how Kenneth More got his big break.”
Gatiss’s lack of a handicap hasn’t proved an obstacle. It seems, 20 years on, that he has arrived at that rare place where he – and Sherlock co-creator Steven Moffat – can pretty much make what they want. How, I wonder, did Dracula happen?
“It came about oddly. We had just started the third series of Sherlock and I had a photograph on my phone of Benedict [Cumberbatch] silhouetted against a door, with his collar up. I showed the picture to Ben Stephenson, then head of drama at the BBC, at an awards dinner and said, ‘He looks like Dracula, doesn’t he?’ And Ben said: ‘Do you want to do it?’ That didn’t mean we were commissioned – that is just where it began.”
It feels, I say, like a good year to be creating horror shows. Does he think the dramas we’re drawn to reflect the anxieties we absorb from the news, or act as an escape from them?
“I think both,” he says. “In the 1930s, people wanted to see Busby Berkeley musicals, but there was also a big horror boom. It’s one way to contain our fears. I think we are drawn to things like Succession because we need to see the rich and powerful having troubles. But equally we want to watch Spider-Man because we want to believe that there are forces out there that can sort things out for us. It doesn’t surprise me at all that these things are co-existing.”
Having created a microcosm of little England monsters in the League of Gentlemen’s fictional Royston Vasey – “a local town for local people” – Gatiss now encounters them on the Parliament channel. “We live in an age of popinjays, and so many of them are really weird constructs,” he says. “People like Mark Francois, Rees-Mogg, Johnson, the common factor is how much performance is involved. And tragically we still fall for it.”
When we speak, we are at the outset of the election campaign. Gatiss, who must be a natural optimist to get so much done, is beset by a sense of impending doom. “Nobody knows anything, except, deep down, that we are fucked and we have to live through it,” he says. “We probably have to leave, just to earth the storm. At least then we can say: OK, we’ve done it. Now what?”
The immediate answer to that apocalyptic question appears to be “apple crumble”. It is a day for comfort food. “Every day is one of those now,” Gatiss says. He confesses to switching to Classic FM in the mornings in search of respite from Today only to hear an Orwellian subtext: “They were playing trailers saying ‘Breakfast without the B word’. The theme is like ‘relax until you open a vein’.”
I wonder if he has been tempted to up sticks and work in the US. There must have been offers, post-Sherlock?
“You would be surprised how little interest there is,” he says. “Eighteen months ago I got an email from a major studio asking if I would be interested in talking about writing a horror property they had – I won’t say what. I knew I wasn’t going to do it, but I made the mistake of replying politely, you know, ‘If I could have told my eight-year-old self I’d be offered this…’ I had 40 emails by return, insisting I speak to this person and that person at this Pacific Standard Time. It’s a totally different way of working. It astonishes me that anything good comes out of America when their whole system seems to be based on firing people. I have no wish to be fired.”
He checks his watch, drains his coffee, makes his excuses. Horror stories are beckoning. “I think in general people find it very hard to realise that the thing they are living through might be the good thing,” he says, of ambition, and calms before storms. “And then they discover it’s too late.”
Martin’s Close is on Christmas Eve on BBC Four, Dracula begins on New Year’s Day on BBC One, and In Search of Dracula will air on BBC Two in January
