Another consummate series of Inside No 9 ends tonight on BBC2 with Seance Time, a typically gothic chiller featuring Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s now trademark blend of comedy and deepest, darkest horror. And, as with the five other totally diverse episodes this time round, you never turn out to be watching what you think you’re watching. Not since Tales of the Unexpected have British viewers been treated to such elegantly crafted half-hour slices of intrigue, unease and all-out emotional intensity. And all while being made to laugh, even if the laughter is sometimes of the uneasy kind.
In series one, particularly remarkable for the flawless execution of that entirely silent episode featuring a bungled robbery, the League of Gentlemen co-creators took in every influence and style, dramatic and comic, displaying a giddying range. If anything, the second series has seen them stretch their parameters still further with parodies of everything from Ayckbourn (Nana’s Party) to Witchfinder General in The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge.
Where to start when plucking out favourite moments? The one that got everyone talking and left me in a puddle of feelings for the rest of the week was The 12 Days of Christine. It starred Sheridan Smith as a young woman experiencing strange lapses in memory and unsettling visions in her otherwise ordinary existence. At times it surged into nerve-jangling ghost story as a strange voice crackled on the baby monitor and eggs smashed on the floor. At others, I suspected I was watching a drama about dementia. I genuinely didn’t see where it was going, but, now that I think back, there were unexplained car noises on the soundtrack: that “ping” that denotes your door is open but the headlights are still on. And then the reveal: the whole tale was Christine’s life flashing, fragmented, before her as she died in a car accident. Smith’s contained, emotionally nude performance and the careful, harpoon-accuracy of the writing clutched me by the heart and squeezed in a way that caught me completely off guard. Her final, calm, “Goodbye, everyone. I love you,” was like the swing-thud of a blunt instrument. I haven’t cried like that for a long time.
And it’s not just emotionally complex drama the creators wrangle so effortlessly. The Trial of Elizabeth Gadge managed to pull together a loving tribute to its cult horror source material with an all-out gag rate that most sitcoms would fail to keep up with. “Not since the escaped cow has there been such excitement here,” says the Justice of the town of Little Happens, a place that boasts both a pond and a duck. The two men had a ball as Mr Warren and Mr Clarke (a tribute to the actor who died this year?), the ideologically opposed spook persecutors who came to a sticky end at the hands of their prey. They get the look and tone just right and then inject it with the kind of comedy that is perfectly tailored to puncture the fictional world without deflating it.
With six completely different realms to create, you’d think they’d have stuck to traditional filming methods, but in Cold Comfort, Pemberton and Shearsmith directed the whole thing on four fixed CCTV cameras, just to make their lives that bit more difficult. You could argue they are at the stage in their careers where they don’t need to experiment. No one else makes television like them and yet still they push themselves.
Another of their strengths is pulling at the loose threads of suburban life to reveal the worst of humanity just under the soft furnishings. In Nana’s Party, they poured out a dose of pure acid with an Ayckbourn homage worthy of the man himself. Pemberton played a put-upon middle-aged father and husband, coming apart at the seams during a strained family gathering. But they started this playlet with an ambulance screaming to a halt outside the house, leading you to believe the conclusion would be gory. The tragedy was an altogether more gruesome punctuation to the story as Pemberton’s face betrayed the total emotional collapse going on within.
Both men write and direct this series but their performances are also often truly noteworthy. For the first time this year, they shared the prize at the Royal Television Society awards for their comic performances in the first series of Inside No 9. The recognition they have received for that series, and now I suspect this one, isn’t nearly noisy enough. When a short series can encompass so many different styles, awards panels don’t know how to cope and they slip through the cracks.
Inside No 9 alone should be an argument for every awards jury in the land to create a new category: best writer-performer in a dramedy/comeda (there must be a better word). Someone think of a new word and make this happen, stat.
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