“Peanut butter, golden syrup, red, blue and green dye – that makes a really good, gloopy, viscose product,” says Kath Hughes, one quarter of the macabre sketch group Gein’s Family Giftshop, revealing her personal recipe for fake blood. There’s another ingredient that she claims she cannot recall, although this could be a Colonel Sanders-style subterfuge to keep it a secret. “But it must be chunky peanut butter,” chips in her cohort James Meehan. “So you can see the bits.”
Charmingly named after the serial killer and bodysnatcher Ed Gein, the group perform absurd, sometimes horrific skits wearing PE kits – largely because they’re cheap, and what with all the squirting claret, easy to replace. Of course, there’s also something mildly unsettling about seeing grown adults in black shorts, white T-shirts and gym pumps. One instantly gets the feeling that something unpleasant could be about to happen.
“Often people see ‘sketch show’ and they think ‘Great, that’ll be all puns and knockabout fun!’ That’s not really what we do,” explains Kiri Pritchard-McLean, who writes and directs, but doesn’t perform (though she will be bringing her own stand-up to MIF). “People do sometimes come expecting a lovely, late-night sketch show, and we’re all jizz, bums and fake blood. But we’re completely the opposite of shock comedy.” Gein’s bill themselves as an anti-sketch sketch group. “There’s lots of mumbling and shrugging. We don’t sing, we don’t do accents. We’re trying to shift ourselves tonally away from what sketch is.”
They certainly manage that. One charming vignette finds fourth member Edward Easton, a gifted physical comedian, offering Hughes a pint from the other end of a busy bar. She can’t hear him, so he mimes: ‘Want a pint?’ And then mimes a bit more. And a bit more. Things soon degenerate into him miming an entire night out, which ends tragically, after which he depicts his own molestation in the depths of hell. They’ve had the odd walkout – one, notably, during a sketch about a man who thinks his wife’s given birth to a teratoma, the type of gruesome tumour sometimes found in the body that has teeth and hair, even bodily organs. The punchline is absurdist: as the horror unfolds and he describes what he is seeing, it turns out it’s actually a baby after all; the man is just an idiot.
Their obvious precursors are The League of Gentlemen, who are big fans. Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton turned up at one of their Edinburgh shows a few years back, staged deliberately at the Pleasance, the same venue at which the League won their Perrier award in 1997. It was a nerve-shattering moment, but they must have done something right. Shearsmith has called them “exceptionally brilliant”, inviting Hughes and Meehan to appear in an episode of the pair’s horror anthology series Inside No. 9.
Formed in late 2011, having met doing various performance-based courses at Salford University, Gein’s are fiercely loyal to their northern home. Despite the epicentre of comedy being in London, they pledge that they will never be tempted to move south. “I have a sizeable chip on my shoulder that feels like sometimes our social commentary isn’t picked up on, or willingly misconstrued because we have northern accents, and obviously haven’t been to great schools,” says Pritchard-McLean. “If ‘educated’ people perform the joke, it’s very good, but if someone says it in a Chorley accent, some people fail to see the nuance. That’s gross.” But basing themselves in Salford, she adds, has been a help rather than a hindrance, because they could perfect their show without the scrutiny. “We got good while no one in the London comedy industry was watching.”
Gein’s are currently thinking hard about their next move. They already curate successful comedy nights in Manchester and London, and they’ve been courted by comedy bigshots like Tiger Aspect. They might move on to telly, but they’re “not in a hurry” and if they do, it won’t be a sketch show. They’re more interested in taking the tone of the Gein’s live experience and “creating worlds”. Whether our world will be ready for theirs is another matter.
- Gein’s Family Giftshop appear as part of Machynlleth Comes to Manchester, at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, 8 July.
- The Guardian is a media partner of Manchester international festival.
