Tubbs (aged 33) and Edward (aged 84), are a married couple as well as brother and sister. They are proprietors of Royston Vasey's local shop (which they inherited from their mother and has apparently been in the Tattsyrup family for generations), located on the top of a hill some distance away from the town. Both have distinctly piggy noses (in live shows, the actors simply hold their noses up with tape). Despite being complete outsiders to most of the other action in the show, they have become, arguably, the most popular and identifiable characters.
Edward, who claims to have served in the armed forces and had been in "a war" at some point, has a distrust of outsiders (possibly caused by his experiences in combat) and is likely to emerge from the back of the shop saying "Hello, hello? What's going on? What's all this shouting? We'll have no trouble here!" (regardless of whether or not any shouting is actually going on) and challenge people with the question, "Are you local?" and dismiss those who reply "no" with, "This is a local shop, for local people; there's nothing for you here" — one of the show's best-known catch phrases. Edward is the most sadistic of the pair. After torturing two work men and letting them escape, he loads a crossbow and says to Tubbs with relish "they won't get very far".
Tubbs (real name Tulip), though also scared of newcomers, dreams of visiting the "bright lights" of towns and cities (usually London, said as "Landan"; also places such as Swansea and Chorley), whose existence Edward has tried to keep from her. She tends to ask "Are you local?" with both hope and fear mixed in her voice, but is afraid that visitors may take her "precious things" from the shelves of the shop (in particular, the snow globes on the counter). Despite being a serial killer, she is more childlike than her husband and only acts under his influence. Tubbs has extremely bizarre eating habits, such as eating bugs, faeces, hair sandwiches and eating onions like apples.
Edward and Tubbs have a son, David, who develops a bestial nature after his reunion with his parents at the end of Season 1. Prior to that, he was a mild-mannered civil engineer responsible for building a new road threatening to link Royston Vasey to the outside world; after the reunion, his parents keep him locked up in the attic. During Season 2 they attempt to kidnap a wife for him; in the end the unwitting victim is Barbara, a transgendered taxi driver.
The couple are serial killers, responsible for a large number of murders in the area. Some of which occurred when trying to kidnap friends and a wife for David ("be careful, Tubbs...we don't want her to suffocate like the other three"); others were intended to stop the building of "New Road." Some murders seem to be simply for their gratification (for example, they kill two construction workers, a backpacker and a police officer after Tubbs gives the game away- she yells out "We didn't burn him!").
At the start of Season 3, they are seen to have survived the fire set by the inhabitants of Royston Vasey at the end of Series 2. (They are wrongly suspected of starting the nosebleed epidemic, which is ironic given the countless murders they actually are responsible for.) They decide to follow "New Road" and contemplate beginning a new life with a new shop. Unfortunately, as Edward's glasses were smashed by the incident and he's unable to see, so Tubbs, using one of the snow globes as a map, has been leading them along a railway line, and they are both promptly hit by a speeding train. But, as revealed in Series 4, they somehow survive. Edward recalls the incident in Series 4 Episode 2.
They go on to appear in the live show as angels, although this is set in a "bubble" outside of the main show, much like the film, where they appear briefly and accidentally kill Jeremy Dyson.
In the final shot of Season 3 we see a brief glimpse of their grandchildren in Barbara's arms. They have the same pig noses as Edward and Tubbs.
However, they are actually alive in the anniversary specials, where they keep two women as hostages.
The couple's piggy noses may have something to do with the family's bestiality towards pigs meaning that the reason for their strange noses are genetic. This is implied in the second episode of the first series where Tubbs is shown breast-feeding a piglet. The noses, and Edward's appearance in particular, may also be indicative of congenital syphilis. Another thing to note is their ages. While the Series 1 DVD biographies state that Edward is 84 years old and Tubbs is 33 (also throwing doubt on their mother's age based on the decades between their conceptions) the audio commentaries for the series note a time in the 16th century when Tubbs betrayed Edward and that the couple got married in the 14th century making them both over 700 years old.