You never quite know what you're going to get when you venture Inside No. 9.
Each week, the anthology series from Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith can veer from the grotesque to the hilarious - all in the space of a single episode.
From a witch trial in the 17th century to the very human tragedy of a birthday party gone awry, series two took in the heartbreaking '12 Days of Christine', the chilling 'Cold Comfort' and more.
Digital Spy spoke to series co-creator, writer, performer and first-time director Shearsmith about how series two was crafted - and whether a third might be in the works.
There's been a great response to this series of Inside No. 9 - do you follow the reaction as it goes out?
"Yeah I do, it's great to see the reaction - especially because there's so many surprises, which happily we've managed to keep a lid on - and there's been some great responses to some of the directions the stories have taken.
"It's lovely to think that they're working as pieces of drama and comedy in their own rights. They're all very different in tone and it's been nice that people have gone with that, that they have been embraced it for the anthology it is, and for the six different films that they are."
Episode two - 'The 12 Days of Christine' - provoked an especially strong reaction. Did you foresee that happening?
"Not really - well, in part. We knew it was very moving and we thought Sheridan [Smith] really came through for us on that one. She's a great actress and we wanted someone you would care about in that 30 minutes.
"I think it worked better than we expected, it was a great response to it. It seems to have haunted a lot of people - I've had lots of people tweeting me saying that it's stayed with them and that it was very powerful. So that's great - it's the best you could hope for, really.
"I mean, it's not a particularly funny episode - which, if you're being mean-spirited, you would say it's failed, if you think of it as a 'BBC comedy' - but we kind of knew that. We just, 'Well, it's good, so we can forgive it being light on laughs that week'."
Is that a concern? Does each episode have to be as funny as it is unnerving?
"Yeah, well, there's always a pass [on the script] where we think… it is coming out of BBC Comedy - it's apparently meant to be funny - and I think Jon Plowman - the executive producer - has always got more of an eye on that above everything else.
"There's a lot of dark and horrible scenes running through the stories, so I think he's always thinking, 'Can we bring it back round to it being funny?' - he breathes a sigh of relief if they're slightly broader, because it is apparently meant to be a comedy.
"But I think increasingly we're more interested in them working not just as comedies, but just as pieces of telly that make you sit up and surprise you and you're gripped. That's always a lovely feeling - and I think that's what we strive for more than making 'hilarious half-hours of comedy'.
"Sometimes it really does turn completely black and you wouldn't want people laughing - we want to make people find peaks of peril that you would get in any actual drama, and I think that's why they're surprising to some people, because you're not quite geared up for some of the places we take you, in what is apparently a half-hour comedy programme on BBC Two."
You and Steve made your joint directorial debut on this series - how did that come about?
"Well, we've always toyed with the idea of directing our own things - the scripts we write are very detailed and give whoever's going to end up directing them a real steer into just exactly as we imagined it.
"We do picture how things will work, how reveals will work within the frame of the picture, so it wasn't too big a leap to dare to think we could direct it. But we've always shied away from doing it, because we thought it was too much to take on.
"We're in them as well, and we've written them, so it's good to dare to think that some people might know better than us, and not be completely megalomaniacal and take over the reins of doing that as well.
"But when David Kerr couldn't do the second series, we then had the opportunity of getting a few different directors… and it just seemed to fall naturally that we got these other two [directors] to do two [episodes each] - and then we thought, well, we could do two as well. Two that we're not in that much, perhaps...
"It didn't quite work out, 'cos we were both in 'Nana's Party' quite a bit, and 'Cold Comfort' really, so it was an unusual choice, but it was the way that the schedule fell, really. But we were excited to do it and it was a great treat to direct actors.
"I found it a really interesting experience being on that side of it, 'cos you can very quickly unravel an actor's performance if you tell them the wrong thing - so it became a very careful game as to what was worth tinkering with and what was worth leaving, because you'd actually only make it worse! (laughs)
"The actors, I think, enjoyed being directed by us - because, being actors ourselves, it felt like we were quite respectful of everyone's choices, and no-one really was wayward in what we imagined, ever - we've always managed to cast people that have delivered better than we had hoped."
Do you write the scripts and then cast them, or do you ever write a part thinking, 'It'd be great to get David Warner...'?
"No, we write it without anybody in mind - if you pin your hopes on someone months in advance and then they can't do it, you're forever feeling, 'That was a shame, because that wasn't rendered just as we imagined it' - so we don't dare to do it.
"We just write, hopefully, good parts that we think we will appeal to people and then much closer to the actual time of filming - sometimes a week, sometimes three days - we put out the offers to people that we'd like to do it and hopefully they'll be hooked in by the script.
"That seems to have happened a lot with these ones - everyone we asked said yes, which is great - and I always like to quiz people as to why they wanted to do it, 'cos a lot of people we got… they don't need to do this little half-hour - but they all responded to the scripts.
"They said, 'We don't get good scripts!' - and I know what it's like to look at things and think... the other day Steve and I were talking about turning down things, 'cos we do get offered things - and he'd turned down another thing and I said, 'Well, the best things on television are the things we do!'
"It's a lovely position to be in, because we do write the best parts for ourselves, though we do quite carefully think about the story first... it isn't always necessarily that we write a script and shoe-horn ourselves in, which is why sometimes, we were barely in them.
"The 'Christine' one, we were barely in it, because we thought, 'We can't play young people anymore!' - so we do carefully think about… the most important thing being the story first, and then if there's a place for us in them."
Do you write specific parts for yourself and Steve - or picks which parts to play once the scripts are written?
"Maybe sometimes there's half an eye on it… it depends. Some of the parts in these ones, literally almost the day before filming, we were swapping back and forth. We couldn't decide, because there's a bit of us in all these parts - so we could kind of probably play all of them.
"The parts of Andy and George in 'Cold Comfort' - for a long time, we didn't know which way round it was going to be. It felt like the more obvious route would've been for me to be Andy - the new recruit coming in - and for Steve to be the boss, but we changed it because we thought it would be slightly more unusual, to shake it up a bit."
'Cold Comfort' had an unusual look - all told through security camera footage. Was it your ambition to 'shake up' how the show looked as well?
"Yeah. The nature of the anthology format gives you the opportunity do that, to experiment with the form. I'm sure a whole series filmed like 'Cold Comfort' would be a bit wearing on the eye, but you can do it for one episode because it's obviously an experiment.
"It could have been disastrous - people might have found it absolutely dreadfully boring - but I think it was actually the opposite, because it was quite riveting and unsettling in the fact that you didn't quite know where to look.
"On the first series, we did the one that was essentially a silent episode - so we do like to push the boundaries of television and make things interesting for us executing it as well as the viewer watching it."
Are there plans for a third series of Inside no. 9?
"Yeah, we've talked about it - the BBC haven't yet requested it. We've got to go in and have a meeting about what is next. We would like to do more.
"I think it's one of those things where they collate the reaction and... I don't quite know what it is, the yardstick of getting a third one. It's hard to get a third series of anything these days – they don't do 'em.
"This is slightly different, because it'd be six different things again – and that's possibly a good thing. It's not a third series of something they might think has run its course, 'cos as long as we can think of six new different stories, they all could be fresh and interesting again."
Many people objected when series one's 'A Quiet Night In' - which you submitted to BAFTA - didn't get a nomination this year. How did you feel about the whole thing?
"You just can't... I mean, there's no rhyme or reason to it, is there? You would drive yourself mad if you... you'd be like Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood, seeking revenge... (laughs) and maybe I will!
"But I was surprised that it didn't get a nomination. Maybe arrogantly I thought it was an excellent piece of television and I thought that's what BAFTA celebrated, so I was saddened to not even get a nomination. Maybe next time.
"I was upset, I did think it was a shame that it's not been recognised. You want people to have seen it and to have recognised the work, and innovation, but I think people are doing that. I get told that every day on Twitter, or in meetings.
"Ultimately It's one night in your life that you don't get a golden face – but the true winning is being allowed to keep doing it. As long as we keep being allowed to do it... it is 20 years since we started with our League of Gentlemen thing, so it's amazing to be still be thought of, and still be in the game."
Inside No. 9 Series 2 is out now on DVD and is available from www.bbcshop.com.
