The fifth series of Inside No 9 opens with an episode set entirely in a referees’ changing room. Four professional pedants, discussing football minutiae and indulging in weak banter in a glorified toilet stall (this is the Championship, at best). It is not a setup that screams thrills and chills – or even the potential for a passably entertaining comedy. Yet, over a taut half hour of play, creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton manage to mine pathos, comedy and nauseatingly high-stakes drama from a superficially tedious setting. And if you had any doubt about whether they would, then you have obviously never been in the presence of this superlative comedy-horror anthology show.
Over the past six years, Inside No 9 has made an artform of extracting scintillating storytelling from utter mundanity. Series three’s The Bill converted the excruciatingly dull discourse over who pays what at the end of a meal into a gratifyingly wild thriller. After that, the show spun a subtly strange and, ultimately, deeply shocking tale from a man’s year-long quest to track down the owner of a misplaced shoe (Diddle Diddle Dumpling). And one of the most depraved and disturbing episodes, The Riddle of the Sphinx, revolved almost exclusively around crossword puzzles.
Shearsmith and Pemberton’s ability to transform absolutely anything into half an hour of must-see TV is an invaluable asset for Inside No 9, which has already had an impressively long lifespan: for a British TV show at least partly classified as a comedy, five series qualifies as a marathon run. It is a method that could future-proof the format for years to come. But how do they do it?
At this stage, the pair can partially rely on the fact that their reputation precedes them. Having made their names as co-creators of The League of Gentlemen, the absurd and inordinately creepy BBC comedy that recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, they will be for ever associated with its deeply macabre humour – however apparently anodyne their work first appears. But Inside No 9 has also established its own set of expectations, becoming best known for its killer twists (often, literally). Its creators might not love that particular trademark (“It would be a terrible thing if people were only watching it for the last 30 seconds,” Shearsmith told the Guardian in 2017), but the anticipation of genuine shock means even the dullest of curtain-raisers can have you on the edge of your seat.
Yet the show’s ability to surprise goes well beyond hairpin narrative turns. Inside No 9 practises a kind of genre-fusion that is still a rarity in the TV schedules. Aside from the sadcom (a sub-genre that combines sitcom grammar with gut-punch emotion), most programmes still do what they say on the tin: cosy comedies don’t tend to veer into demonic horror, crime procedurals rarely descend into slapstick. On Inside No 9, they can, will and have.
This thrillingly elastic tone is not the only way the show rubs up against the status quo. Perhaps the most admirable thing about its success is that it never panders to modern televisual trends. Its low-key setups are not designed to reel in fickle streaming audiences. It is unbingeable – there are no bloated narrative arcs to suck you in, nor any ridiculous cliffhangers to force you to click on to the next instalment. You cannot “stan” its protagonists or make memes out of it, there is no recognition factor. It is radically brilliant 2018 Halloween special was made to be consumed as it was broadcast, rendering its catch-up incarnation decidedly inferior.
The meta-magic of that live version (it involved real-time Twitter and pre-planted tabloid stories) is just one of the high-concept tricks Shearsmith and Pemberton have used to breathe new life into TV drama. Past episodes have been told in reverse chronology, iambic pentameter and CCTV footage. There is more innovation in the pipeline: the coming series features an instalment consisting solely of six to-camera monologues. Meanwhile, the largely improvised third episode, Love’s Greatest Adventure, returns to the warm, intensely ordinary kitchen-sink mode that the show frequently inhabits, this time through the prism of an advent calendar. It is, though, essentially one more example of Shearsmith and Pemberton’s knack for finding the unexpected heart and horror beneath infinite pedestrian exteriors. By creating yet another denouement you won’t see coming, the episode ends up unlike anything else they have ever done. Or, as is usually the way with this reliably spine-tingling and tirelessly inventive gem of a show, unlike anything anyone else has ever done.
Inside No 9 is on BBC2 tonight at 10pm
