Benjamin Denton and his Auntie Val are coming back to Royston Vasey. As we are too, 15 years on, for a three-part, three-night The League of Gentlemen (BBC Two) 20th birthday celebration. No Uncle Harvey – he has (not so) sadly died. They are coming back for the funeral.

The creepy girls, Chloe and Radclyffe, are still there in the house, but much older now. “Hello, Benjamin, it’s nice to see you again,” they say creepily, in unison, like the twins from The Shining who inspired them. “We’ve had no one to play with, for years and years and years.”

A few things have changed in town. The Local Shop has burned down, though Edward and Tubbs seem to have survived and are squatting – and trading – in a block of flats that is due to be demolished next week. There is a greedy photo booth in town – it swallows anyone who dares enter, and their dogs.

Royston Vasey’s very existence is under threat, its days numbered. The county is moving the boundary line to exclude RV, which will be swallowed up into one of the bigger towns to bring down crime figures, unemployment and missing persons. The Rev Bernice, now mayor, isn’t too fussed, until she learns that her free parking space outside Oddbins might go. “Get some placards and paint and phone rent-a-mob,” she says. “We’re not going down without a fight.”

That – Royston Vasey going the way of Sodom and being obliterated from the face of the Earth – could be a narrative thread through these three episodes. There is also a lot that is familiar. Mr Chinnery the vet is still operating – on a bloated hedgehog called Mittens today. It doesn’t go well, as you can imagine. Mittens explodes, covering the faces of the young owner and her mother with hedgehog goo and firing hedgehog spines into their faces. Ew, into their eyes as well.

Barbara is still driving the pink cab, gender-neutrally now and has come up with an acronym: ACRONYM, which stands for Actively Considering Reassignment Or Not Yet Made Your Mind Up.

At the jobcentre, Pauline the sadistic restart officer is delivering one of her condescending courses to a roomful of the perpetually unemployed … Oh, except that it’s not the jobcentre at all, it’s some kind of care home, where Pauline is a patient with dementia. They have recreated her past; it’s called reminiscence therapy … Ha, that’s clever – a nice twist. And it appears that reminiscence therapy is an actual thing, too.

Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson always did that well – dipping a toe into the real world from the weird, macabre one they have created, or starting with a seed of reality that is then allowed to grow, unchecked, into something really odd. The gender-neutral cab and Barbara’s acronym are another example of it, and of how this revival engages with things that have happened in the 15 years or so since these characters were last on the small screen. They have also clearly had a lot of fun deciding what those years have done to their monsters.

That’s the genius of TLoG, the characters. I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t the show’s biggest fan before. I am a big fan of everyone responsible, and of other things they have done. Inside No 9, which gets a knowing little nod at the end of this episode, is one of the joys of recent television.

But The League of Gentlemen was more like something I could appreciate – its balls, the imaginativeness of its creations and creators, their own moving of boundary lines – without actually loving. It was really just a matter of taste then; maybe it was too weird, too bloody and too boysy; there were too many movie references that I didn’t always get. It was like a club – a school horror appreciation club – that I didn’t feel that I belonged to.

And that hasn’t really changed. But for everyone who was in the club, this revival will be like Christmas, even if that doesn’t sound right, biblically. Not that the Rev Bernice would know.

Actually, I do want to know what happens to Royston Vasey and its inhabitants over the next two nights. It, and they, have got a little bit under my skin. It is like the sign says: you’ll never leave …