“We always talked about doing something again,” Steve Pemberton tells Empire, dressed as Tubbs in full-Rose-from-Titanic get-up. To set the scene, our brand new issue sees The League Of Gentlemen’s central trio recreating – and possibly ruining – iconic movements from movie history. But more importantly it’s to celebrate the fact that, for the first time since their 2005 film, the gang are finally returning to our screens.
With 2017 marking the 20th anniversary of the original radio show, it seemed only right that Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss and co-writer Jeremy Dyson got back together for what Gatiss calls “a weird half-series”.
“It was borne out of us wanting to spend some time with each other again,” Shearsmith tells Empire, “because we never quite do it anymore. We meet each other all the time in separate configurations, but it’s never more fun than when we’re all together. We cry with laughter.”
“I think Britain’s become Royston Vasey,” says Gatiss. “We’ve become a local country for local people: ‘There’s nothing for you here.’ That seems to be the message we’re projecting to the world. So I think Britain seems to have caught up with us, in a strange sort of way.” But Shearsmith is keen to stress that this is not “a Brexit special. We’re not doing anything clever with it,” he continues. “It’s just going to return, like it’s never been away.”
The League is keeping mum plot-wise, but what we can tell you is that there is a threat to Royston Vasey. And, according to Gatiss, “there’s an inevitable, quite pleasing melancholy about where [the characters] might have got to”. We can't wait.
The League Of Gentlemen airs on BBC Two this Christmas. The January Issue of Empire is available from Thursday 30 November