Reece Shearsmith

Stag preview

The hunters become the hunted as each one is horribly eliminated, one gobby moron at a time.

TV preview: Stag, BBC2

I don't really need to tell you much about comedy chiller Stag. The cast should be enough of a selling point. Jim Howick, Reece Shearsmith, Rufus Jones and Tim Key as well as Stephen Campbell Moore, James Cosmo and Pilou Asbaek. If you don't know some of the names you'll certainly know the faces.

Stag: episode 1 review

From the producer and director of BBC Two comedy thriller The Wrong Mans comes another series that combines dark humour with a deadly chill.

This opens like every crime drama you've ever seen, with a dark dreary landscape and heavy clouds gathering on the horizon. Bleak piano music plays as a car slowly winds its way through the sinister hills. I'd probably have switched off at this point if it wasn't for the fact that this is a comedy series, and no ordinary comedy but one starring the dark genius of Reece Shearsmith.

It's a three-part comedy thriller set in the Highlands and begins like a parody of An American Werewolf in London: Ian, a small and polite little Englishman in a dinner jacket, finds himself in a wild Highland village and he ventures into the local pub to be met with silence and sneers. "You shouldn't be here," he's told but the silence is soon broken by a bunch of idiots who come dancing through the pub in a conga line.

Ian is in the Highlands for a stag weekend but he's seems a bit too genteel for the antics which are planned. The rest of the party are arrogant, wealthy bankers from London who've come to Scotland to indulge in "sleeping rough, hanging tough and stalking your prime rib deer across the Highlands."

But when they leave the pub and enter the wilderness, this bunch of bankers are reduced to frightened schoolboys, being stripped naked and threatened with drowning and perhaps rape by stags and it becomes a comic version of Deliverance set in the Highlands.

The second series of this superb and unique comedy from Reece Shearsmith was always going to make the list. The first series was one of the biggest highlights of 2014 meaning this second series of the standalone comedy stories had a lot live up too. Whilst some episodes failed to reach the high standards set by the first series, special mention must go to Sheridan Smith's episode and a deeply engrossing episode set in a call centre.

Reece Shearsmith's favourite TV anthology episodes

To celebrate the release of Season 2 on DVD (out now), Cult Box asked Reece Shearsmith to select some of his favourite ever TV anthology episodes...

You should be watching: Inside No. 9

Occupying a Tuesday evening timeslot on BBC Two, it was perhaps inevitable that Inside No. 9 didn't received the recognition it deserves. After only two short series, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton have succeeded in creating one of the most original and well-written British TV series in years.

Radio Times review

There's a star turn from Reece Shearsmith as a demented fishmonger who cadges a lift to work with John and Kayleigh as this curious little observational comedy trundles along.

Shearsmith plays Ray, a colleague of the pair at the superstore but no one wants anything to do with him because he reeks of fish. In any event Kayleigh isn't at her best after a drunken night at a friend's farewell party where she drank a few too many "cheeky Vimtos", which, she tells John, "are all the rage in Basra".

There are signs that John (Peter Kay, who co-wrote and directed) is growing quite keen on his car-sharer, and the pair are developing a sweet and funny relationship forged to the cheesy hits of "Forever FM".