There’s a slight pause when I ask Mark Gatiss to tell me what dramas he’s enjoyed on TV recently, and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Modesty prevents him from picking out a lot of the obvious contenders on account of the fact that he’s either starred in or written them.
Last month he was Peter Mandelson in Channel 4’s Coalition, Andrew Graham’s enjoyable political drama about the last election; before that he was the shadowy Stephen Gardiner, secretary to King Henry VIII, in the BBC’s hit production of Wolf Hall. He’s co-created the BBC’s most popular drama of the decade, Sherlock, in which he plays Holmes’s older brother Mycroft. And then there’s Doctor Who, his first great love, which he has both starred in and written for, but let’s not forget cult comedy League of Gentlemen that he created more than a decade ago with his Leeds University friends Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson, and that proved his big break.
And yet he’s one of those actors who almost disappears into their roles. He has an everyman quality that, given the right hairstyle or false beard, makes him almost unrecognisable from one programme to the next. It’s only when I look at his credits that I realise he was behind the big ginger moustache as Major Benjy in the BBC’s recent remake of Mapp & Lucia. It’s no mean feat to go from the major to being an uncannily convincing Mandelson.
“Oh, I loved playing Mandelson,” says Gatiss. “I’ve always been fascinated by him and I always wanted to play him, so it was a joy. I’m a real politics junkie, and I think the thing that’s always appealed to me is the echo with history. Whatever way you live it, it’s always the struggle for the crown, which is why people make comparisons to Shakespeare in these things, why Gordon Brown’s fall is a deeply tragic story.”
It’s also why Gatiss is enjoying his current project so much. It’s another Andrew Graham play, called The Vote, this time set in a polling station on 7 May and which Channel 4 is going to broadcast live from the Donmar Warehouse on election night.
“Obviously it’s the first time something like this has been done, so I was immediately intrigued. There’s a cast of 50, so it’s totally insane. We’re in rehearsals at the moment and it’s going very well, but it’s quite mad. I’ve genuinely never done anything like it. That’s the thrill of it.”
It’s a great time for a politics junkie, and we riff on Nigel Farage, who he suspects will be “a character in the next coalition drama”. He’s been involved with efforts to encourage people to register to vote with comedian David Schneider and writer Armando Iannucci. Schneider collectively described them as “the anti Russell Brand”.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” says Gatiss when I mention it. “I met Russell Brand a long time ago; he’s a lovely man. I just think he’s wrong. I just think he’s terribly wrong. I mean, he’s charismatic and convincing. But there’s something incredibly disturbing about what he’s saying. Telling people not to vote! What on earth is he saying? But then no one should take lectures about normal life from somebody who got married on top of an elephant.”
The Mandelson figure – “the person standing behind the throne whispering in the monarch’s ear” – is a familiar figure to Gatiss. He’s there, too, in the character he plays in Wolf Hall. “And I owe him an awful lot because he’s responsible for me being Mycroft in Sherlock,” he says. “I auditioned to play him before in the Channel 4 drama about Mo Mowlam, and I went straight on in my suit to a Sherlock meeting where we were talking about how we were going to bring Mycroft in. And we’d already talked about his views of the British government being the ‘dark government’, and it all just slotted into place.”
The critical and popular success of his and co-creator Steven Moffat’s version of Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman has been nothing short of astonishing, though he corrects me when I describe it as a “cult success”.
“I have to take issue with the notion of cults. Sherlock is the biggest drama on the BBC. Its worldwide audience is fucking extraordinary. So it’s not in any way a cult. We’ve only made 10 episodes, the 10th of which hasn’t even been on yet. And most people, of course, just watch it and like it. And then there’s a very, very dedicated, vocal audience that watches every episode 30 times. That’s the cult part.” But then Gatiss can empathise. It was his lifelong fascination with Sherlock Holmes that led to the commission, just as it was his obsession with Doctor Who that led the way to his involvement with the 2005 Russell T Davies re-boot.
“It’s my first love, my last, my everything,” he says. “I owe it so much, because in so many ways it’s what got me interested in acting and writing.” Growing up, Gatiss had a fascination with horror and the gothic and the slightly macabre. He lived in Sedgefield, County Durham, the youngest of three, and his family home was opposite the Edwardian psychiatric hospital where both of his parents worked. Now he calls this “the horror of everyday life”, and in his 20s he wrote several novelisations of Doctor Who which brought him to the attention of Russell T Davies when he was looking for writers for the new series.
“I got a call at midnight from a friend of mine saying: ‘Are you sitting down?’ And I said: ‘No, I’m lying in bed.’ He told me: ‘Doctor Who is coming back.’ And I’m like: ‘What?’” A few days later he got a call from Davies and ended up writing an episode set in Victorian Cardiff at a seance held by Charles Dickens. “It was Christmas 2004. The best present I got.”
But then his whole career, at the moment, he says, is “fulfilling the dreams I had when I was eight.” Are there any left?
“James Bond,” he says without any doubt, and given his track record, it’s surely a matter of time before he gets the call. The combination of writing and acting is, he says, a dream scenario. His only frustration is turning down juicy acting gigs for writing commissions and the other way round, though amazingly, despite the success of Sherlock, he doesn’t always get his passion projects greenlit.
“Not at all,” he says. “It happened very recently.” And then he goes into a passionate diatribe about “the forces of darkness who are trying to destroy the BBC”.
“I just can’t bear the ratings obsession. It’s the first line of every email. It’s the first thing you hear. But this is why the licence fee exists. And the BBC is copying these formats from the commercial industry and is at risk of death by 1,000 cutbacks. I just think the argument should be brought to a head with a referendum about the licence fee. ‘Do you want this or not?’ And I think 98% of the population would say: ‘Of course we do.’ Because for a paltry amount of money, it champions the right to experiment and the right to fail, and to take creative risks. The Daily Mail would cower under a rock. It’s time the BBC go grow a pair of bollocks and fight back.”
His outspokenness and impatience perhaps isn’t a coincidence. In the last couple of years, he lost his mother, his sister and his brother-in-law, and it’s completely changed his outlook on life. “I’ve been terribly lucky in a lot of other things in my life. But it changes everything about you. I feel both more at peace with the world and more impatient. I feel less tolerant of wasting time, but I’d also rather like to enjoy myself more, let go of things more lightly. I feel dreadfully depressed about the state of the world. I was watching the destruction of the city of Nimrod, on the news last night, and it’s just so awful. You feel so powerless about the big narrative, so I almost feel beholden to just try and pull the things together and fight for what I can, and just get on with it. We’re here for such a short time.”
We are. Though some people pack more in than others. He finishes his coffee, and he’s off. There’s a new project to write (“a film – something quite different, about a murderer”) and rehearsals for The Vote to attend. The everyman goes forth.
Watch the British Academy Television Awards, Sunday 10 May, 8pm, BBC One and BBC One HD
