Книга: Mark Gatiss «Last of the Gaderene»

Mark Gatiss
Gatiss in 2008
Born	17 October 1966 (1966-10-17) (age 45) Sedgefield, County Durham, England
Occupation	Actor, screenwriter, television producer, comedian, novelist
Years active	1993–present
Spouse	Ian Hallard (2008-present)[1]

Mark Gatiss (born 17 October 1966) is an English actor, screenwriter and novelist. He is best known as a member of the comedy team The League of Gentlemen, and has both written for and acted in the TV series Doctor Who and Sherlock.

Contents 1 Personal life 2 Early writing work 3 Performing 3.1 The League of Gentlemen 3.2 Other television work 3.3 Radio, stage and film 4 Writing 5 Bibliography 5.1 Books 5.1.1 Doctor Who novels 5.1.2 Doctor Who anthology contributions 5.1.3 The League Of Gentlemen (with Jeremy Dyson, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith) 5.1.4 Lucifer Box novels 5.1.5 Miscellaneous non-fiction 5.1.6 Miscellaneous fiction 5.2 Audio plays 5.2.1 Doctor Who (and related) 6 References 7 External links

Personal life

Gatiss was born in Sedgefield,^[2] England, where he grew up opposite the Edwardian psychiatric hospital where both his parents worked. His childhood passions included watching Doctor Who and Hammer Horror films on television, reading Sherlock Holmes and H. G. Wells, and collecting fossils. All of these interests have fuelled his creative work as an adult.^[3][4][5][6]

He attended Heighington CE Primary School and Woodham Comprehensive School in Newton Aycliffe; at the latter, he was two years ahead of Paul Magrs, who would also go on to write Doctor Who fiction.^[7][8]

He is openly gay and featured on The Independent on Sunday's Pink List of influential gay people in the UK in 2010^[9] and 2011^[10]. He is married to actor Ian Hallard, and has a Labrador, 'Bunsen'.^[1] He once built a Victorian laboratory in their London home, as the fulfilment of another childhood dream.^[3]

Early writing work

Following his childhood interest in Doctor Who, Gatiss's early writing was devoted to the series. His earliest published fiction was a sequence of novels in Virgin Publishing's New Adventures series of Doctor Who stories, beginning with Nightshade in 1992. In these works, Gatiss tried to correct the problems which had led to the show's decline in the late 1980s.^[4]

The first television scripts he wrote were for a BBV video series called P.R.O.B.E., four low budget, short Doctor Who spin-off films which were on video. Although the films featured the ex-Doctors Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker and Peter Davison, they have not been reissued on DVD. Gatiss said in a 2004 interview that he would not authorise their re-release as regarded them as having been a learning exercise.^[4]

His other early contributions to the Doctor Who franchise included four novels, two audio plays for BBV and two audio plays for Big Finish Productions.^[11][12]

Performing

The League of Gentlemen

Gatiss is perhaps best known as a member of the sketch comedy team The League of Gentlemen (along with fellow performers Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and co-writer Jeremy Dyson). He first met his co-writers and performers in his late teens at Bretton Hall, West Yorkshire, a drama school which he attended after finishing school and having spent a gap year travelling around Europe.

The League of Gentlemen began as a stage act in 1995, which won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1997.^[3] In the same year the show transferred to BBC Radio 4 as On the Town with the League of Gentlemen, and later arrived on television on BBC Two in 1999. The television programme has earned Gatiss and his colleagues a British Academy Television Award, a Royal Television Society Award and the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux.

In 2005, the film The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse was released, to less enthusiastic reviews. The comedy team has never split up, and may work together again in future.^[3]

Other television work

Outside of the League, Gatiss' television work has included writing for the 2001 revival of Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and script editing the popular sketch show Little Britain in 2003, making guest appearances in both. In 2001 he guested in Spaced as a villainous government employee modelled on the character of Agent Smith from The Matrix film series. In the same year he appeared in several editions of the documentary series, "SF:UK". Other acting appearances include the comedy-drama In the Red (BBC Two, 1998), the macabre sitcom Nighty Night (BBC Three, 2003), Agatha Christie's Marple as Ronald Hawes in The Murder at the Vicarage, a guest appearance in the Vic & Bob series Catterick in 2004 and the live 2005 remake of the classic science fiction serial The Quatermass Experiment. A second series of Nighty Night and the new comedy-drama Funland, the latter co-written by his League cohort Jeremy Dyson, both featured Gatiss and aired on BBC Three in the autumn of 2005. He appeared as Johnnie Cradock, alongside Nighty Night star Julia Davis as Fanny Cradock, in Fear of Fanny on BBC Four in October 2006, and featured as Ratty in a new production of The Wind in the Willows shown on BBC One on 1 January 2007. He wrote and starred in the BBC Four docudrama The Worst Journey in the World, based on the memoir by polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard.

Gatiss has also appeared twice in Doctor Who. In 2007, he played Professor Lazarus in "The Lazarus Experiment"^[13] and in 2011 he returned in the Series 6 episode "The Wedding of River Song" as a character known as Gantok.

Also in 2007, he appeared as Robert Louis Stevenson^[14] in Jekyll, a BBC One serial by his fellow Doctor Who scriptwriter Steven Moffat.^[15] In 2008 he appeared in Clone as Colonel Black. He also made a guest appearance in Pemberton and Shearsmith's comedy series Psychoville. In 2010 he portrayed Malcolm MacLaren in the BBC drama Worried About The Boy which focused on the life and career of Boy George, and also appeared uncredited as Mycroft Holmes in the BBC drama Sherlock, which he co-created with Steven Moffat.

He adapted HG Wells' The First Men In the Moon as a 2010 television film of the same name for the BBC, also playing Professor Cavor.^[2][16]

In 2010 he also made a three-part BBC documentary series entitled A History of Horror, a personal exploration of the history of horror cinema.^[17]

Radio, stage and film

Gatiss appears frequently in BBC Radio productions, including the science fiction comedy Nebulous and The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes story The Shameful Betrayal of Miss Emily Smith. In 2009 he was The Man in Black when BBC Radio 7 revived the character (originally played by Valentine Dyall and Edward de Souza) to introduce a series of five creepy audio dramas. He is also involved with theatre, having penned the play The Teen People in the early 1990s, and appeared in a successful run of the play 'Art' in 2003 at the Whitehall Theatre in London. In film, he has starred in Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004) and had minor roles in Birthday Girl (2001), Bright Young Things (2003), Match Point (2005) and Starter for 10 (2006). The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse, a film based on the television series, co-written by and starring Gatiss, was released in June 2005. He also plays the recurring character of Gold in the audio revivial of Sapphire and Steel produced by Big Finish Productions. Gatiss also appeared in Edgar Wright's fake trailer for Grindhouse, Don't, a homage to 70's Hammer Horrors.

In the 2008 English language DVD re-release of the cult 2006 Norwegian animated film Free Jimmy, Gatiss voiced the character of "Jakki", a heavy-set, bizarrely dressed biker member of the "Lappish Mafia". In this his voice is used along with the other actors of League of Gentlemen such as Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. The dialogue was written by Simon Pegg and other actors included Pegg himself, Woody Harrelson, and David Tennant, who worked with Gatiss on Doctor Who.

Mark appeared in the stage adaptation of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother at the Old Vic in London from 25 Aug-24 Nov 2007. He won much critical acclaim for his portrayal of the semi-transsexual Agrado.

Mark was scheduled to perform in Darker Shores by Michael Punter, a ghost story for all the family, at Hampstead Theatre 3 December 2009 - 16 January 2010 but had to withdraw after a serious family illness. Tom Goodman-Hill took over his role.^[18]

In March 2010 he was a guest on Private Passions, the biographical music discussion programme on BBC Radio 3.^[19]

From December 2010 to March 2011 Gatiss was playing the role of Bernard in Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings at the Royal National Theatre in London alongside Catherine Tate.

Writing

Fulfilling a lifelong dream, Gatiss has written four episodes for the 2005-revived BBC television series Doctor Who. His first, "The Unquiet Dead" was only the third episode of the revived series in 2005; the second, "The Idiot's Lantern", aired the following year in the second series.^[20] After a sabbatical from the third series (in which he acted in rather than wrote for), and his submitted script for the fourth series, involving Nazis and the British Museum, remaining unmade, he eventually returned to the programme as of 2010, writing "Victory of the Daleks" for the fifth series, and "Night Terrors" for the sixth.

Gatiss has written two episodes of Sherlock, a modern Sherlock Holmes series co-produced by himself and Steven Moffat. The unaired pilot was shot in January 2009 and a full series was commissioned, eventually airing a three-episode series in August 2010 (including Gatiss's episode "The Great Game"). A second series (featuring Gatiss's second contribution "The Hounds of Baskerville") has been shot and is awaiting transmission.

Gatiss wrote and performed the comedy sketches The Web of Caves, The Kidnappers and The Pitch of Fear for the BBC's "Doctor Who Night" in 1999 with Little Britain's David Walliams, and played the Master in the Doctor Who Unbound play Sympathy for the Devil under the name "Sam Kisgart", a pseudonym he later used for a column in Doctor Who Magazine. (The pseudonym is an anagram]of "Mark Gatiss", a nod to Anthony Ainley, who was sometimes credited under an anagram to conceal the Master's identity from the viewers.) The pseudonym was used again in television listings magazines when he appeared in episode four of Psychoville, so as not to spoil his surprise appearance in advance^{[citation needed]}.

In mainstream print, Gatiss is responsible for a biography of the film director James Whale. His first non-Doctor Who novel, The Vesuvius Club, was published in 2004, for which he was nominated in the category of Best Newcomer in the 2006 British Book Awards. A follow up, The Devil in Amber, was released on 6 November 2006. It transports the main character, Lucifer Box, from the Edwardian era in the first book to the roaring Twenties/Thirties. A third and final Lucifer Box novel, Black Butterfly, was published on 3 November 2008 by Simon & Schuster^[21].

Lately, Gatiss has often been seen as the writer, producer, and star of a string of projects for the BBC Four channel, including The Worst Journey In The World, the Christmas ghost story Crooked House, an adaptation of HG Wells' The First Men In The Moon, and the documentary series A History Of Horror.

Bibliography

Books

Doctor Who novels

• Nightshade (ISBN 0-426-20376-3)
• St Anthony's Fire (ISBN 0-426-20423-9)
• The Roundheads (ISBN 0-563-40576-7)
• Last of the Gaderene (ISBN 0-563-55587-4)

Doctor Who anthology contributions

• Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts (teleplay "The Unquiet Dead") (ISBN 0-5634-8641-4)
• The Doctor Who Storybook 2007 (short story "Cuckoo-Spit") (ISBN 1-84653-001-6)
• The Doctor Who Storybook 2009 (short story "Cold") (ISBN 1-846-53067-9)
• The Doctor Who Storybook 2010 (short story "Scared Stiff") (ISBN 1-84653-095-4)
• The Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who 2011 (short fiction "The Lost Diaries of Winston Spencer Churchill") (ISBN 1-8460-7991-7)
• The Brilliant Book Of Doctor Who 2012 (short fiction "George's Diary") (ISBN 1-8499-0230-4)

The League Of Gentlemen (with Jeremy Dyson, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith)

• A Local Book for Local People (ISBN 1-84115-346-X)
• The League of Gentlemen: Scripts and That (ISBN 0-563-48775-5)
• The League of Gentlemen's Book of Precious Things (ISBN 1-853-75621-0)

Lucifer Box novels

• The Vesuvius Club (ISBN 0-7432-5706-5)
• The Devil in Amber (ISBN 0-7432-5709-X)
• Black Butterfly (ISBN 0-7432-57114)

Miscellaneous non-fiction

• James Whale: A Biography (ISBN 0-3043-2863-5)
• They Came From Outer Space!: Alien Encounters In The Movies (with David Miller) (ISBN 978-1901018004)

Miscellaneous fiction

• The King's Men (as 'Christian Fall') (ISBN 0-3523-3207-7).
• The EsseX Files: To Basildon and Beyond (with Jeremy Dyson) (ISBN 1-8570-2747-7).

Audio plays

Doctor Who (and related)

• Time Travellers: Republica
• Time Travellers: Island of Lost Souls
• Phantasmagoria
• Invaders from Mars

References

External links

• Mark Gatiss at the Internet Movie Database
• Nightshade ebook
• Mark Gatiss at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

v · Reece Shearsmith • Steve Pemberton TV shows The League of Gentlemen (Episodes, Characters) • Psychoville (Episodes) Films The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse Books A Local Book for Local People See also Mark Gatiss • Jeremy Dyson • Dawn French • Daniel Kaluuya • Jason Tompkins • Imelda Staunton • Eileen Atkins

Preceded by Simon Pegg

Narrator of Doctor Who Confidential 2006

Succeeded by Anthony Head

Persondata
Name	Gatiss, Mark
Alternative names
Short description	TV and radio writer and actor
Date of birth	17 October 1966
Place of birth	Sedgefield, County Durham, UK
Date of death
Place of death