Macabre mind in a League of his own opens door to his local shop of horrors

Jeremy Dyson’s Ghost Stories comes with a stark warning.

“The show is unsuitable for anyone under the age of 15. We strongly advise those of a nervous disposition to think very seriously before attending.” You might think this could put audiences off, but more than 120,000 people have been to watch the box office hit that has had people, quite literally, jumping out of their seats.

Dyson co-wrote the show with his friend Andy Nyman, director of Derren Brown’s TV and stage shows and star of Dead Set. “Andy came to me with the idea of having two, or three, people sitting on a bench simply telling ghost stories and it developed from there,” he says.

Since opening in Liverpool last year it has moved to the West End where it is enjoying an extended run. “The idea is that the audience knows as little as possible,” Dyson explains. “But we also wanted it to be an immersive experience for people from the moment they’ve bought their tickets. We both love theatre but we both have a problem with boring theatre when it doesn’t deliver what it promises. When theatre works, though, it’s fantastic and it’s a great place for telling stories.”

Both he and Nyman are big fans of ghost stories and the old Hammer Horror films, and wanted to create a spine-tingling show on stage. “We felt it was something that had been under-used in the theatre and we realised from the very first night that there was a real hunger for this kind of experience. There was a feeling that the audience had been waiting for something like this, so from our point it was perfect timing.”

What is it about horror stories that people find so fascinating? “As a genre it’s perennial, it doesn’t go out of fashion. It’s a bit like going on a rollercoaster or bungee jumping. It’s a cathartic experience. There’s also something deeper than just the thrill, it’s how it works as a metaphor and how you articulate that.”

Dyson has forged a career from the macabre. He made his name as a member of the comedy team The League of Gentlemen, which also included Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. The show became a cult hit, winning a Bafta for Best Comedy, and since then he has written several plays, including Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales.

Dyson was brought up in Leeds and describes himself as a “fairly normal” teenager. “I was into horror films, conjuring and magic and stuff like that and I was lucky to have parents that were happy to fuel this passion. They bought me these scary looking Punch and Judy puppets one Christmas and I started doing entertainment shows at children’s parties.”

Like many teenagers he was also into music, although unlike most he nearly made a career out of it. “I joined a band called Flowers for Agatha as a keyboard player and we had a single out and signed to a local record label, we even got on to Radio One,” he says. “At the time I wanted to do that more than anything else, the writing came afterwards.” The band eventually spilt up, although his brief foray into the music business inspired one of his subsequent League of Gentlemen creations. “There’s a character in it called Les McQueen, who’s a washed-out glam rock guitarist, and he was basically me.”

Dyson was studying philosophy at Leeds University when a friend introduced to him Mark Gatiss, a student at Bretton Hall, near Wakefield, where he also met Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, who would later complete The League of Gentlemen line-up. “We all shared the same passions and the same fascination with various elements of popular culture,” he explains. “There was this weird convergence between us, we liked specific English horror films and at the same time we were all fans of Alan Bennett. Our sense of humour was very catholic, but it all fitted together.”

They were each dabbling in writing and performing but didn’t join forces straight away. “It was a while before we all started working together. It was an old friend called Gordon who said we should all work together and he basically made us do it.”

Performing as The League of Gentleman, their first show was in 1994, but it wasn’t until they played the Edinburgh Festival two years later that people really started to sit up and take notice. “We signed up with the BBC and we were on the radio by 1997.”

The show proved hugely popular and quickly made the transition to TV. “It was a product of all the stuff we loved, things that made us laugh and I think we were just in the right place at the right time. There wasn’t anyone else doing the things we were,” says Dyson.

The show revolved around the fictional northern village of Royston Vasey, whose bizarre inhabitants included Tubbs and Edward Tattsyrup, who run the “local shop for local people”, and the sinister Papa Lazarou, a circus ringmaster who steals wives and calls everybody “Dave”. They drew inspiration for their characters from all kinds of unlikely places.

“It could be bits of documentaries, or Kilroy, but it was normally either people we knew, or snippets of overheard conversations that we would build into a character.

“I was sitting behind two businessmen on a train and one kept saying ‘young man’ and the other one said ‘sir’, it was like a vocal tic and I was able to build a whole sketch out of that. The people in the show are fairly monstrous, but it was people’s petty quibbles about status and things like that which we found endlessly fascinating.”

Dyson was the only non-performing member of the group, preferring to concentrate on the scripts. It was an arrangement he was more than happy with.

“They had all studied drama whereas I hadn’t. I didn’t have the requisite skills, in my own estimation, and I felt a bit silly on stage. They are all such brilliant performers and I could barely remember my lines, but because it wasn’t an ambition that I’d put a lot of energy into it wasn’t a difficult decision.”

The show ran on TV for three years, during which time it attracted a cult following, but Dyson says they knew when it was time to stop. “When we did the movie we tried to move away from Royston Vasey, but there was too much gravity pulling it back, so we definitely got as much juice out of it as we could.”

Since they called time on The League of Gentleman, Dyson has written plays, short stories, novels and co-written the Bafta-nominated TV comedy drama series Funland.

After a spell living in London he has moved back to his native Yorkshire with his young family, where he spends his working day in his writing “shed”. “It’s at the bottom of the garden and it’s a very pleasant place to work because I can keep the kids out, although having said that my daughter keeps bringing in dandelions for me. But it’s good because I can shut the door on whatever I’m working on at the end of the day, and I like that.”

[email protected]

Ghost Stories is on at the Duke of York’s Theatre, London, until June 26. Box office 0870 060 6623.