The story of a simple Northern village where everyone keeps themselves to themselves and people like to keep things 'local', The League of Gentlemen is one of the most powerful comic formats ever created.

At times genuinely moving, at others so profoundly disturbing and shocking that it transcends traditional comedy, most of the time TLOG is just extremely funny, biting and brilliantly, dramatically written - the classiest sketch-based format written in recent broadcasting history.

Starting as a revue format at Edinburgh and then vaulting onto radio, The League of Gentlemen is a sketch show, although it is also a sitcom - particularly in its television guise.

In the village of Royston Vasey, various characters mostly played by Gatiss, Pemberton and Shearsmith inhabit a dark world of secrets and offhand depravity.

Most appalling and most famous, however, are characters such as Papa Lazarou, the owner of a traveling circus whose catchphrase 'Hello Dave?' looks innocent on paper but which sounds utterly disgusting, and Tubbs and Edward, who run the 'Local Shop for Local People', fiercely hate outsiders, and at least in the TV version of the show, both show pronounced inbred, piglike noses.

Most formats that travel from radio to television, especially dark, imaginative formats such as The League, suffer because the mind tends to be able to 'do' things with the characters which reality can't match.

On radio, too, the series was more obviously 'sketches' - mainly owing to being performed live. Most of the TV series was made, however, on location and then screened for the audience.

The result is that although there's a laughter track, it's hardly noticeable, and doesn't interfere with the scenes - allowing The League to become its own world much more effectively.

Three series of The League were produced, with the BBC not closing the door on a fourth.

The first series saw the inhabitants reacting badly to a road being built through the town; the second saw plenty of deaths owing to a rash of nosebleeds. The first two series were both massively popular and cultish at the same time, winning a BAFTA, a Royal Television Society Award and a Golden Rose at Montreux.

Debates about the slightly less popular third series and the film remain rife - with diehard fans of the 'proper' League wishing that the creators had simply stuck to their original idea.

This, however, misses the point - which is that it was that need to create truly original characters that drove the League in the first place, and you can't stuff that genie back in the bottle. Whether they do another series or something completely new, it will be startling, and different - not just the old stuff redone.