Reece Shearsmith

Inside No 9 was a perfect little half-hour of claustrophobic grand guignol, and Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are the bastard love-children of Alfred Hitchcock and Roald Dahl. A Eurostar six-berth couchette from Paris to Bourg-St-Maurice, a scarily thin, scarily ambitious doctor, a fat farting Kraut, a northern top-bunk couple anticipating their mad daughter's wedding, Jack Whitehall as a spoilt-posh delivering seriously undeliverable lines with entirely believable gusto, an unnerving twist in the tail. Beautifully, beautifully dark, and guiltily funny, and nobody now does it better.

Sheridan Smith stars in a story that sees Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith departing radically from their usual claustrophobic black comedy; there is little to laugh at in The 12 Days Of Christine, a study of time and memory that resembles a short enigmatic arthouse film. In a dozen scenes coinciding with public or personal red-letter days, Smith plays a woman passing through marriage, motherhood, divorce and bereavement, with Paul Copley, Michele Dotrice, Tom Riley and the writers in supporting roles.

Alarming things keep happening to Christine, making her increasingly troubled and presenting the viewer with a series of puzzles. Why, for example, does the heroine's flatmate mention mathematical number theory? Why are we subjected to Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman warbling Time To Say Goodbye? Are these significant clues, or just red herrings?

This enduring Radio 4 show is one of those excellent ideas that seems glaringly obvious once someone else has thought of it. The basic concept is a hostless chat show; an initial guest chooses a sparring partner who, the following week, chooses another, and so it goes on in a cheerful human centipede of chat. This series began with Adam Buxton talking to Reece Shearsmith and has passed through a range of comedy luminaries, including Vic Reeves and Sharon Horgan.

Even by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's usual high standards, this week's instalment of Inside No. 9 is exceptional. Set in a small flat, The 12 Days Of Christine follows the key moments in the life of a young woman, played by Sheridan Smith. But, as always, everything is not quite as it seems. Powerful, poignant and inventive, it's a masterclass in concise storytelling.

Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are something else. In the first series of Inside No. 9 last year, there was an episode involving a couple of masked idiots trying to steal a painting from a modernist home in which scarcely a word was spoken, and yet it was one of the funniest, cleverest, most imaginative and original programmes shown on television in the last 15 years. They've done it again.

This magnificent episode [The 12 Days of Christine] is not entirely perfect - there's a lot of spooky creeping around at night with lights flickering on and off that suggests the pair may have spent more time with The League Of Gentlemen and Psychoville than is strictly healthy. However, if you treat the presence of the otherworldly as a means to an end, the episode is a distillation of accurate observation that says more about the hope and messiness and disappointment of life in half an hour than most dramas say over an entire series.

It describes the trajectory of one woman's life - superbly performed, as always, by Sheridan Smith - from her student days to marriage, children and beyond. At the very end, looking back with sadness and regret, she says: "I didn't think it would turn out like this." There is something infinitely poignant about seeing two different versions of events and recognising the chasm between what might have been and what was.

Review: Inside No. 9, 2.1 - 'La Couchette'

They'll perhaps never again create anything with the impact of The League of Gentlemen, which changed the television landscape back in 1999 (inspiring a wave of twisted comedies like Nighty Night, while challenging the very idea of what a BBC comedy could look like), but Inside No. 9 is nevertheless a brilliant anthology show that sees former-League members Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton channel their gift for the macabre into fresh weekly stories.

Review: Inside No. 9. Episode 2.1 - 'La Couchette'

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are exceptional storytellers, their writing is ingenious, incisive and full of telling detail. The intricacies in their work are deployed to tell a good story & tell it as well as possible.

The return of Inside No. 9 was a delight. Strangers trapped in a train compartment, in this case a TGV couchette, is hardly more original a starting point than time travel, but Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, who wrote and starred, scored a laugh ever few seconds and then a home run with a savage resolution.

The remarkable thing - and here credit is shared with a cast that included Mark Benton and Julie Hesmondhalgh - was that the passengers were little more than stereotypes: a drunken German; a tarty Aussie backpacker; a control-freak Englishman and Jack Whitehall (who has become a type all by himself). Yet they were as fresh as the pilgrims in Chaucer's Prologue.

Inside No. 9 review

Even if they don't make you laugh, you have to concede Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are the most febrilely inventive writers on TV. But to say they are an acquired taste is like mentioning that absinthe isn't everybody's tipple, and that human sacrifice takes some getting used to.

The anthology series from Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith returns. We begin on a six-berth sleeper in France. Without giving too much away, expect fart jokes, an unpleasant discovery and, in a show that makes a virtue of its claustrophobic environs, mismatched passengers winding each other up. The script is a delight, with one line delivered by Jack Whitehall quite possibly the most gloriously tasteless you'll hear on television all year. Also starring Julie Hesmondhalgh and Mark Benton.