By Christopher Stevens for the Daily Mail

Published: 21:19 EDT, 20 April 2022 | Updated: 04:46 EDT, 21 April 2022

Secrets of the  Museum (BBC 2)

The League Of Gentlemen are comedy’s Rolling Stones. They’ll still be doing reunions in their 80s.

I’d lay money that Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith have pondered out loud about which of them will die first, and whether the other two should carry on without him.

That’s a macabre thought, but the macabre is their stock-in-trade. They’ve been creating nightmarish characters and gruesome twists for 25 years, with incarnations on radio, TV, film and stage.

Their sitcom, like a Hammer Horror version of Coronation Street, ended in 2002, and Gatiss went on to create Sherlock while Pemberton starred in Benidorm.

I’d lay money that Steve Pemberton, Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith have pondered out loud about which of them will die first, and whether the other two should carry on without him

But the trio have reformed repeatedly, including a League anniversary special five years ago. It was inevitable that, when they eventually met up for an episode of Shearsmith and Pemberton’s deliciously dark playlets, Inside No. 9 (BBC2), the theme should be a reunion.

The three played former university friends, getting together for an afternoon’s boating on a lake after not seeing each other for years.

Each star played an exaggerated version of his public persona. Pemberton was a scruffbag who thought his mates were too full of themselves and who made a point of calling their pedalo a ‘paedo’.

Shearsmith was shy, uptight, prissy and stuck in the past, eager to make the get-together ‘a celebration of who we used to be’. And Gatiss was pompously camp, letting the other two know his career had gone much better than theirs.

Inside No. 9 is now in its seventh series, and some of the half-hour scenarios have been extraordinarily convoluted. Last year’s batch began with a jewellery heist with characters taken from the traditional Italian panto style of commedia dell’arte.

This latest story was less mannered, and better for it. The pedalo got stuck in the middle of the lake, the old friends bickered, and when one of them revealed a bereavement, the mood turned dark . . . as it always does in this show.

Top actors who have queued up for cameos include the late Helen McCrory, Timothy West, Derek Jacobi and Felicity Kendal.

There was a hint of the League Of Gentlemen’s relish for rural oddities in Secrets Of the Museum (BBC2), as curators at the V&A’s Scottish branch worked to conserve a theatrical relic

The guest here was Diane Morgan, slightly underused as Pemberton’s foul-mouthed girlfriend. No one does coarse, common and sweary better than Morgan, but she didn’t get the chance to shift beyond second gear, doing little more than reprising her character from Motherland.

Assembly line of the night: One of the baby-oiled twerps flaunting his biceps on the vacuous U.S. dating show FBoy Island (BBC3) crowed: ‘There’s no one else here like me.’ He was too thick to realise every one of the 20 young men was identical. Are they built from plastic parts in a factory? 

Even to raise a complaint like that emphasises how high the standards are. There won’t be a dud episode, that’s practically guaranteed. And you can’t help wondering what the three Gentlemen have planned for their next reunion.

There was a hint of the League Of Gentlemen’s relish for rural oddities in Secrets Of the Museum (BBC2), as curators at the V&A’s Scottish branch worked to conserve a theatrical relic.

The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil was a 1973 play by John McGrath, touring the Highlands and telling the history of Scotland. For its set, the company used a giant, hand-painted pop-up book made from corrugated cardboard, which the actors carried with them on the roof of their van.

How a cardboard backdrop survived the Scottish weather on the open road without turning to pulp was not explained.

Now the outsized pages are on display at the V&A in Dundee, and treated with a reverence usually accorded to medieval manuscripts. Other items included a 350-year-old Colombian tray that had been labelled as Persian by mistake.

How odd, the things that become artefacts.

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