The pubic wig, or merkin, originated in the 1450s and was worn by women who shaved their pubic hair to combat lice. Five hundred and fifty years later, and merkins were thin on the ground: Mark Gatiss used two beards stuck together, in 1998, for his League of Gentlemen character Val, who went nude on the first Monday of every month. A seam of pink between the welded beards looked, on screen, like his penis, so it had to be coloured in with CGI. The year 2017 brought, to his joy, a “massive merkin” for the 21st century TV comeback: his character keeps her door key under it. As we talk, Gatiss, in shorts and sitting on a plastic chair, morphs in and out of Val with his soft voice and luxuriant gestures: “I am always taking my clothes off.” There is hardly anything to the nude suit, he points out: just the huge breasts and bush. The rest is Gatiss’s actual skin.
Upstairs in a converted church in north London, the League of Gentlemen gather around a MacBook, writing their forthcoming arena show. Inside these quiet men of average height are howling portraits of rage, cannibalism, cruelty and perversion. With their strange faces, they always seemed to be linked by DNA – a warped creative family who resembled each other just as they resembled no one else, a little like the way the Nineties band Supergrass did. Twenty years after their show began, they still refract their many characters: in Reece Shearsmith, you feel the smiling, pent-up Ollie Plimsolls of the Legz Akimbo educational travelling theatre troupe, author of the plays Slitface (about burkas) and Suck it and See (about revenge porn). Steve Pemberton, with his ice-blue eyes, is one of the women he plays – tough and warped, an amalgam of the ruthless job centre restart officer Pauline, and the mentally challenged Tubbs, of the Local Shop.
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