My culture picks: Mark Gatiss

8 January 2018

With The League of Gentlemen returned to our screens, one quarter of the award-winning comedy team Mark Gatiss – known for both his acting and writing talent on TV shows such as Doctor Who and Sherlock - shares his top cultural picks with Front Row.

God’s Own Country is the 2017 award-winning debut feature by writer/director Francis Lee. Set in the north of England, the film depicts the intense romance that develops between two young farmers, one of whom is an immigrant.

Mark says: “I loved it. It’s a rare thing. It is set in Yorkshire and is a gay love story about two hill farmers. It’s fantastically real, very bleak but very emotional and ultimately very positive. It was fantastic.”

“I’m very excited about what Francis Lee does next. He lives on a farm with his dad and he just created it out of nowhere really. It gives an enormous amount of inspiration to anyone who thinks ‘I want to do something. I want to express myself,’ and not for very much money.”

God’s Own Country won the Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival 2017, having been the only UK-based production to feature in the category.

God’s Own Country is available on DVD and Blu-Ray. Image copyright Picturehouse Entertainment.

The Secret History of Hollywood is an ongoing podcast series by Adam Roche that brings to life the historical stories and secrets of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Mark says: “It’s just the most wonderful thing. There are lots of episodes - there is a three part history of Warner Brothers called Bullets and Blood. They’re about eight hours long and I could listen to them forever, they are so interesting.”

Mark himself has featured in the podcast series, having recorded the prologues for the most recent strand Shadows about the career of low-budget horror producer Val Lewton. Each strand follows a different historical Hollywood tale and as Mark explains “is a sort of digest of lots and lots of out of print biographies and autobiographies, and is so cleverly done.”

He says: “It’s amazingly powerful stuff. There’s one on the Universal monster movies, a wonderful one on the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films - basically everything I love. I really, really recommend it, it’s fantastic.”

The Secret History of Hollywood is available on Adam Roche’s website.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is the author’s second novel, set in India in the mid-1970s. It follows four unlikely characters as they come together amidst the country’s turbulent state of internal emergency.

Mark says: “It’s just such a fascinating picture of a totally different way of life that is never the less familiar because of the Raj, it’s very inflected with Englishness, or infected perhaps. I just find it sort of heart-breaking.”

The book, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 1996, features several interconnecting stories and Mark explains how it had him hooked: “I was anticipating something dreadful happening in a few chapters time and I sort of couldn’t bear to get there even though it started to feel inevitable, but I think it is a wonderful achievement, really extraordinary.”

A Fine Balance is published by McClelland and Stewart (1995).