TELLY CRUMMIES

The new League Of Gentlemen movie is that rare exception to the rule that British sitcom spin-offs are usually awful, writes Donald Clarke

TOWARDS the close of the smashing big-screen version of the BBC's comedy series The League of Gentlemen, some of the show's characters find themselves faced with oblivion. As stop-motion monsters rear above them and fireballs crash from the sky - not for nothing is the film titled The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse - Matthew Chinnery and others try to convince the writers who created them that they may have a life beyond television.

Perhaps they could be in a film. But what would the plot be? Maybe, somebody suggests, the characters could all go on holiday together, only to discover their hotel hasn't yet been built. Or they could find a bag of money that belonged to the Mafia.

Anybody old enough to remember the awful torpor that engulfed the British film industry in the 1970s will recognise these scenarios as typical of the avalanche of TV sitcom spin-offs which fuelled Wardour Street, winded by the closure of the American studios' London offices, while it waited for the rise of the Puttnam tendency.

Till Death Us Do Part, Dad's Army, Please Sir!, Up Pompeii!, On the Buses!, Father Dear Father, Bottoms Up!: a combination of bad films derived from good series, awful films derived from poor series and effluent derived form something worse than that! (For once, an exclamation point, usually a reliable indicator of bad writing, seems unavoidable.)

Short of working a three-day week with the electricity turned off, there is no more evocative way of experiencing the decline of Britain in those years than sitting through a triple bill of Steptoe and Son Ride Again (good show, bad film), Are You Being Served (poor show, awful film) and Love Thy Neighbour (effluent! effluent!).

"I remember them vividly," Mark Gatiss of The League of Gentlemen told me on a recent visit to Dublin. "Like a lot of things, it wasn't clear there was a genre there until after it was over. With every one you would have a weird jazzed-up version of the theme tune. Then the sets would be wrong somehow. Rising Damp was shot in a real house rather than that wonderful brown set."

And there was always something disconcerting about the fact that the spin-offs were shot on film. An intimacy had been lost.

"Yes, that was curiously distancing," Gatiss agrees. "But there is some interesting history there. One thing that people don't often comment on is that many of the spin-offs in the 1970s were made by Hammer Films. Man About the House was a Hammer film. And the company had started by doing adaptations of The Quatermass series. So, Hammer began and ended with TV adaptations."

In America, where television was still regarded as a dangerous enemy by the movie studios, the process was reversed. A convention developed whereby successful movies - MASH, Planet of the Apes, Private Benjamin - were stretched out, chopped up and displayed before primetime TV audiences. But turn The Mary Tyler Moore Show into a movie? You may as well have suggested adapting advertising copy or pornography. If you made it in movies, whether as producer, director or actor, television was now beneath you.

Recently the situation has changed. But the films of Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch and Mission: Impossible are not spin-offs. Leaving aside cameos, none of the original cast is involved and the original material, often heavily parodied, has nostalgic rather than voguish appeal.

Proper American movie spin-offs are rare and tend to spring from science fiction or animation. (Though, as is his wont, David Lynch broke ranks and delivered a characteristically peculiar - and under-rated - Twin Peaks feature with Fire Walk With Me.) The most financially successful mainstream, big-budget TV spin-offs have been the Star Trek films.

"Yes, the strange mystery of the Star Trek pictures. All the even-numbered ones are good," Gatiss says in a Gothic horror voice. There are lessons here about the right way to tackle these enterprises. "The first one they tried to make into 2001 and you ended up with this boring, pompous film. Then Nicholas Meyer, who had never seen the series, took on the second and just watched all the tapes. He came across a villain he liked - Ricardo Montalban in the episode Space Seed - and just made a very grand sequel."

The key to success seems to involve striking a balance between familiarity and novelty. You have to develop a story that is slightly bigger than those in the relevant series - SpongeBob SquarePants leaves Bikini Bottom on a great quest, the residents of Royston Vasey seek out their creators - without pulling apart the relationships that give the show its character. It has to look utterly different and exactly the same. No wonder so few producers got it right.

The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse opens today

CRACKING TV SPIN-OFFS

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

Cartman, Kenny and Kyle acquire new lexicons of Anglo-Saxon filth after a screen9ing of the Terrance and Philip film Asses of Fire. Their potty mouths invite the wrath of the Christian right. Trey Parker and Matt Stone revel in the opportunity to use all the words they couldn't on television. Great songs to boot.

PORRIDGE (1979)

One of the few films from the British spin-off boom that retains the character of the original. "A very good film," Mark Gatiss says. "The writers Ian Le Frenais and Dick Clement managed to come up with an idea that is big enough for a movie: Godber and Fletcher get liberated from Slade Prison and then have to get back in again. A brilliant idea."

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986)

Kirk and his crew return to San Francisco in the 1980s to save the humpback whale. "People wouldn't listen to you unless you used profanity every other word. You find it in all the literature of the period: Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann," Capt Kirk explains. "Ah. The Greats," Spock replies.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

Is this allowed? None of the film's main characters appeared in the original series, so one might argue that Python's Arthurian pastiche is not really a spin-off at all. Never mind. The humour contains the same combination of absurdity and verbal dexterity that the team had been playing with for the previous decade. So it remains in the list. She's a witch. Now a hit stage musical.

HEAD (1968)

Written by Jack Nicholson and directed by Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces), this hilarious, baffling cinema outing for The Monkees begins with the band committing a kind of suicide and then gets weirder and darker from there. A resounding flop on release, Head has almost nothing to do with the series. "Then again, what does it have to do with anything?" Mark Gatiss says.