Inside No 9: a gutsy dark comedy of misery and mayhem – box set review

There's something about these short, sharp shockers that gets under the skin. The BBC has already repeated A Quiet Night In, the remarkable, almost dialogue-free instalment of the series, which is starting to accrue awards. This DVD release should help spread the word: it's very lendable.

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton – the show's creators, writers and stars – eschew the current TV trend for long, involved story arcs, choosing instead to resurrect the once-popular anthology format. In the 70s and 80s, there were plenty of TV short-story strands, from Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected to Nigel Kneale's Beasts, not to mention Hammer House of Horror. Here, over six episodes, we get unrelated 30-minute tales of morality and mortality, all with different characters, but set in some sort of number nine: a dressing room, a flat above some shops, a gothic mansion, and so on. Apart from the number, there's no thematic link, other than things going very badly indeed for some – well, most – of the characters.

Shearsmith and Pemberton get stuck into things with the same devious fervour that marked out the work of Dahl and Kneale. They take real pleasure in doling out misery and mayhem to the inhabitants of their stories, packing in as many twists and surprises as they can muster, ultimately delivering a show that, like their previous oddity Psychoville, couldn't have been produced by anyone else.

It's all playfully macabre, with A Quiet Night In combining plenty of slapstick as a pair of bumbling burglars invade a home where a rich couple are right in the middle of a break-up. The couple – played by TV veteran Denis Lawson and Game of Thrones star Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie – are not all they seem and, without the aid of dialogue, we get a parade of brutal events and twists. It's engaging, tense, funny, frightening – and accessibly experimental.

But, despite the often innovative approach (the episode Sardines takes place almost entirely inside a wardrobe), it's the characters that shine through. In Tom & Gerri, Shearsmith plays a cynical schoolteacher who takes in local tramp called Migg. Their relationship drastically changes and the story expertly wrongfoots the viewer with some of the series' best twists. Meanwhile in The Harrowing, which closes the series, the duo give full rein to their love of horror: a babysitter arrives at a wonderfully creepy old house to find her job is not as advertised. Mixing in horror tropes, sly humour and some great offscreen ghoulishness (such as a bedridden character who was "born inside out" and "hasn't got a mouth"), it serves as a reminder not only of the grisly absurdity of their old League of Gentlemen days, but also how far they've come since.

It's hard to go into more detail without venturing into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that each episode is a stylish lesson in economy, with a quick setup that is then torn apart, all in a brisk and unforgettable 30 minutes. A second series is currently being written. Who knows – maybe a show as effective and entertaining as this really could catch on.