The Best League of Gentlemen Quotes: A Local Shop for Local People

A local shop for local people

It is the line everyone knows, and it is worth being precise about it, because it is usually misquoted as a single sentence when it is really a double act. Edward and Tubbs Tattsyrup run the Local Shop somewhere up on the moors above Royston Vasey, and they greet outsiders with a rising panic that arrives in two halves: "This is a local shop for local people", then "there's nothing for you here!" — the second half most often Edward's.

What makes it last is that it is not really a joke about a shop. It is a joke about a certain kind of English hostility to anyone from more than four miles away, delivered by two people who have clearly never once questioned whether they are the reasonable party. The shop sells almost nothing anybody wants. That is not an oversight; it is the point.

Tubbs also supplies the show's single most incriminating line. After she and Edward dispose of a backpacker and then a police officer who comes asking questions, it is Tubbs who volunteers, entirely unprompted, "We didn't burn him!" — which is the sort of thing only a guilty person says, and precisely the sort of thing Tubbs would say.

Hello Dave: Papa Lazarou

Papa Lazarou, played by Reece Shearsmith, is a circus master who turns up at front doors disguised as a travelling peg salesman. "Want to buy some pegs, Dave?" is the opening move; "Hello Dave!" is the line that made him a national bogeyman.

The horror of it is in the naming. He calls every woman he abducts Dave — he keeps a book of wives, all of them Dave, some photographed on Polaroids so old they cannot possibly still be alive. And once he is inside, he talks. The gibberish he speaks is called Gippog, and the show quietly confirms it is not a language at all: one of his wives reveals he simply makes it up as he goes, which somehow makes it worse rather than funnier.

The name came from real life. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton once rented a flat from a landlord called Peter Papalazarou, who had a habit of asking for Steve on the phone even when Reece was the only one home. That is the entire origin of one of British comedy's most frightening creations: a man who kept asking for someone who wasn't there.

Pauline, the pens and the dole scum

Pauline Campbell-Jones — Steve Pemberton, in the chunky cardigan — runs the restart course at the job centre, and greets a room of unemployed people with a bright "Hokey cokey, pig in a pokey!" before settling into calling them "dole scum".

Her real obsession is pens. She hands them out like sacraments, guards them jealously, and dreams of opening her own pen shop, which she has already named: Her Nibs. It is a perfect piece of character writing, because it is not a random quirk. Pauline has power over exactly one thing in her life, and it is biros.

She has a real-world origin too. Reece Shearsmith was sent on a restart course in 1992 and had an officer whose actual name was Pauline Campbell-Jones. He has been careful to say the character is not a portrait of her — but the name, at least, is borrowed wholesale.

The Mug

League of Gentlemen Quotes Mug

Most of what is on this page is on the mug, drawn rather than just typed out: the two hanging shop signs, the pegs, the Legz Akimbo van, Hilary Briss's window card, and a Royston Vasey road sign that promises you'll never leave. It wraps the whole way round, so the Local Shop faces outwards whichever hand you hold it in.

View the mug

The newsagent, the butcher and the B&B

Pop (Steve Pemberton) runs the newsagent's and is a landlord besides, and his defining scene is an accounting dispute. His son Rich explains that some kids made off with nine Maverick bars while he was manning the booth, and Pop's response — "Nine Maverick bars, and you say this is nothing?" — escalates towards a belt with a speed that is funny right up until it isn't. In the Drury Lane stage version the scene runs longer and reveals there were no shoplifters at all: Rich had taken them himself.

Hilary Briss (Mark Gatiss) is the butcher, and his contribution to the language of the show is two words on a card: the special stuff. A select few customers are permitted to buy it. Then the town starts having nosebleeds, and the nosebleeds turn out to be fatal. The show never says what it is. Viewers have always assumed cannibalism, and the writers have specifically ruled that out — their line being that cannibalism would be far too ordinary an answer, which leaves the question in a much more uncomfortable place than a straight reveal ever would.

Alvin Steele (Mark Gatiss again) runs the Windermere B&B in a neck brace, with a shock of white hair and a wife, Sunny, whose social calendar he would rather not think about. His catchphrase is the most cheerfully misleading on the mug: "Jump leads for two!" is simply how Alvin offers you a cup of tea.

The ones only proper fans shout back

A quote mug lives or dies on the deep cuts, and these are the ones that separate the casual viewer from the person who owns the box set.

• "Excude beev! Have anabady gat aany battle orange doove?" — Pam Doove, delivering an audition line with a mouth that will not cooperate. Fans spell it a dozen different ways, because it is phonetic and nobody agrees where the vowels go. That is part of the fun.
• "It's a shit business... you'll find out." — Les McQueen, formerly of Eurovision hopefuls Crème Brulée, dispensing career advice nobody asked for.
• "In this house, we do not use the F word!" — Harvey Denton. The F word is frog. The Dentons keep toads, and the distinction is not negotiable.
• "Go, Johnny, go, go, go!" — from the card game with rules that everybody at the table understands except Mike, who becomes steadily more incensed as the others produce fresh conditions out of nowhere. Anyone who has been taught a family card game by in-laws knows this scene in their bones.
• Legz Akimbo — Ollie Plimsolls' theatre-in-education company, touring schools in a van to workshop issues at teenagers who would rather be anywhere else.
• Babs Cabs — run by Barbara Dixon, who will tell you a great deal about her forthcoming surgery over the course of a short journey.
• The Roundabout Zoo — home to a goat, a pig and a chimp, until Edward and Tubbs steal them in The Beast of Royston Vasey and stitch the parts together into a monster, hoping to frighten off the new road.

Why the town is called Royston Vasey

In the original radio version the town was called Spent, which is a fine name and tells you exactly what the writers thought of the place. For television they changed it to Royston Vasey — which is the real, legal name of the comedian Roy "Chubby" Brown.

Brown took it in good part, and later appeared in the show as the Mayor of the town that bears his name. It is a very League of Gentlemen sort of joke: an in-reference hidden in plain sight on a road sign, waiting years for you to notice.

If Royston Vasey is your sort of town, the same treatment exists for a few other places you wouldn't want to live: Peep Show, Red Dwarf and Alan Partridge.