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Mark Gatiss: ‘The way the government has embraced cruelty as a badge of honour is horrible’ - The Guardian

Mark Gatiss: ‘The way the government has embraced cruelty as a badge of honour is horrible’ - The Guardian

Mark Gatiss: ‘The way the government has embraced cruelty as a badge of honour is horrible’ - The Guardian
Nov 25, 2022 2 mins, 5 secs

From The League of Gentlemen to last year’s A Christmas Carol, the writer, actor and director never seems to stop.

When Mark Gatiss and his cast were preparing their stage play of A Christmas Carol last year, they would come out of the rehearsal room in east London to be confronted by the line for the food bank.

“You just think: ‘Scrooge and Marley live,’” he says.

“The way that the current iteration of the government has embraced cruelty as a badge of honour is horrible,” says Gatiss.

“You think: ‘Are we locked for ever in this cycle of compassion and then absence of compassion?’” Gatiss loves Dickens’s book – he reads it every year.

There is the cinema screening of A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story, which Gatiss adapted and in which he played Jacob Marley, a dream ever since he saw the 1970 film Scrooge, with Alec Guinness in the role (“It just seared itself into my brain”).

There is a new half-hour drama: Gatiss has done the last four of the revival of the BBC’s 70s series A Ghost Story for Christmas, an event that now feels as integral to the season as mince pies?

Then, Gatiss will play Larry Grayson in the ITV three-parter Nolly, and he has a role in the next Mission: Impossible film later in the year.

It is a career that has included co-creating the phenomenally successful League of Gentlemen and Sherlock (he says he’d love to do a film version), and acting in just about every quality TV drama of the last few years, including Game of Thrones, Wolf Hall and Doctor Who, for which he has also written.

As the comedian and TV presenter Grayson in Russell T Davies’s highly anticipated drama about the downfall of the Crossroads star Noele Gordon, played by Helena Bonham Carter (Grayson had been Gordon’s friend), Gatiss enjoyed rediscovering the entertainer, “who I loved as a kid.

Oh God, he’s funny.” Stereotypically camp stars such as Grayson and John Inman, he says, were “just part of a TV culture.

Not long ago, he was talking to an actor friend “who was very active in early gay politics” about a documentary on Grayson he had just watched and loved.

There’s something extraordinary about that.” And Grayson, he says, “has a kind of glint.

A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story is in selected cinemas on 27 November and 1 December; see christmascarolcinema.com; Nolly will air on ITVX next year

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