The League of Gentlemen eyeing 20th anniversary reunion
The comedy quartet of Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson will meet this year in a bid to mark 20 years since the TV debut
The League of Gentlemen, the comedy troupe of Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson, are to meet up later this year to discuss a possible reunion.
2017 marks 20 years since they first appeared as the League on BBC Radio – although a show in 2019, marking 20 years since they debuted on TV, is more likely, they have said.
The League of Gentlemen was the multi award-winning cult comedy series which chronicled the weird and wonderful residents of the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey. These included characters like the white-faced clown Papa Lazarou, who kidnapped women, and a butcher called Hillary Briss who sold his customers what seemed like human flesh which made them bleed from their noses.
Other favourites included Edward and Tubbs Tattsyrup who ran a "local shop for local people".
Pemberton said: “This year we will get together and see what flies... We always talk about it. [2019] is 20 years since it was on the telly. But 2017 is actually when we did the radio series.
“We kept trying to make it up, all four of us together. Jeremy’s been doing his Ghost Stories film, [Reece Shearsmith and I] have both been in theatre, Mark’s been in theatre, and we just genuinely have had no chance to get together. But we have made a decision to make that happen.
“It will be a very difficult thing to do, to go back and try and imagine what Royston Vasey will be like now, or whether it’s changed at all."
Shearsmith added: “We’d love to do it if we could all fit the time in and do it. In 2019 it will be 20 years. So maybe we should mark it with something.”
Speculation about a return for the show was fired last year by Gatiss, who said in a radio interview: “We’re hoping to [do it again]. We’ve talked seriously about doing something, we’re not quite sure what it is yet but we’d love to do something...
“I think increasingly, talking about prescience, we have become a local country for local people and I wonder if there is something Brexity in us that we can do.”
The BBC also appears to be keen.
“The door is open to a League of Gentlemen special and it’s up to them,” said a senior BBC source.
Before then, Pemberton and Shearsmith are back with the third series of their anthology series Inside No 9, which airs on BBC2 on Tuesday 21st February.
The new series has six self-contained stories with various settings, including the room of a Cambridge professor and a restaurant.
The pair have also just started filming a fourth series, scheduled to air in 2018.
