Steve Pemberton as Ed Buchan, right, in Whitechapel
Grisly murders, psychotic inbred characters, holidays in Benidorm – they’re all in a day’s work for actor Steve Pemberton.
For many he’ll always be Tubbs, the ‘local’ shopkeeper taking care of the precious things in the nightmare village of Royston Vasey in The League of Gentlemen.
He took his characters to equally bizarre extremes in the BBC’s Psychoville but his latest screen incarnation is as the misfit historian-turned-detective Ed Buchan in the new series of Whitechapel.
Buchan helped the team track down a Jack The Ripper-style serial killer in the first series of the gripping drama. Now he’s back on an equally horrific murder case.
Steve, from Chorley, Lancashire, admits he is drawn to characters with a dark side.
He says: “Reece Shearsmith (his League of Gentlemen co-writer) and I have always had a very dark sense of humour and I think that just comes out whatever we’re writing.
“It’s the combination of horror and comedy, of being scared one minute and laughing the next that we enjoy. It is a very potent combination and I’ve loved doing that.
“Variety is also fantastic and you couldn’t get more variety than writing and acting in Benidorm and then doing Whitechapel and Psychoville.
“There’s a dark message, even in Benidorm. People like stuff that isn’t all gleaming, shining, happy families. I think it allows it to be real and we all have a bit of darkness inside us.”
Steve, 44, who is married with three kids, developed his passion for acting in school plays at St Michael’s CE High School in his home town.
“I was the only boy who turned up for auditions,” he joked.
At Bretton Hall drama college, near Wakefield, West Yorks, he met the rest of the League of Gentlemen team: Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, and his acting and writing career took off.
Whitechapel has helped him extend his range still further.
The stories are all drawn from real life cases. The first tale in the new series is based on The Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811. The killer claimed four victims at a house behind a linen draper’s shop and three more at The King’s Arms in New Gravel Lane.
A principal suspect in the murders, a seaman called John Williams (also known as Murphy), was a lodger at the nearby Pear Tree public house in Old Wapping. Williams was arrested but committed suicide by hanging himself in prison.
He was buried with a stake through his heart at the junction of Commercial Road and Cannon Street Road.
Now that’s an ending dark and grisly enough even for Steve.
Whitechapel, ITV1, Monday, January 30, 9pm
Meanwhile, check out this classic clip of Edward and Tubbs in the local shop. ‘We didn’t burn him….!’
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