Reece Shearsmith

Radio Times review

Bob Mortimer may well be in trouble with his wife after this broadcast. He has told her that he works from 9.30am to 4pm with his comedy cohort Jim Moir (Vic Reeves). He now confesses to Reece Shearsmith that they stop feeling funny around 2pm and he has a nap in a car park.

Such endearing revelations are all part of this show's appeal -- it gets great stories because the interviewees feel comfortable enough to share.

The driverless car of chat shows, Chain Reaction (BBC Radio 4), returned this week with Adam Buxton firing questions at The League of Gentlemen's Reece Shearsmith. The tag-team format allows for a nice variation in tone (the host baton passes to Shearsmith next week, with a new guest in the other chair), but when the host is as thoughtful and considered as Buxton I almost wish it was his show alone. He's the ideal blend of gentle irreverence and a genuine interest in other people. For all the novelty of the format, it was a good, old-fashioned interview, with Shearsmith offering up everything from impersonations of his old acting teacher and revelations about his childhood (he was nearly christened John Wayne) to the intriguing story of the time he became the apprentice to special-effects artist Christopher Tucker, only to run away from his house in the middle of the night "like Jonathan Harker fleeing Castle Dracula". In a brilliant summation of his comedy oeuvre, including The League of Gentlemen, Psychoville and Inside No. 9, he describes the template as: "Three people in a room. One of them goes mad." Chain Reaction is such an obvious candidate for translation to television that it's puzzling it has yet to make the jump.

Radio Times review

Reece Shearsmith looks rather dour as he explains to his interviewer, Adam Buxton, that his looks have helped cast him as the villain/psychopath/character-most-likely-to-run-amok in the sketches of The League of Gentlemen. Is he angry in real life asks Buxton? Not really, he says. If anything, he thinks he has gone soft in his middling years.

He confesses to looking back at a sketch where a vulnerable character is bullied by teenage girls and thinking that he'd crossed the line, that the cruelty had outweighed the laughs. Push him a little harder though and he is soon chuckling over the Sardines episode of last year's Inside No. 9, which he co-wrote with fellow Gentleman, Steve Pemberton. Inspired by a cupboard in the office they share it involves 12 bodies squashed together -- and some child abuse. It does not sound funny but, as Shearsmith points out, it's the dark drama that has made his comedy so different.

Next week he gets to be the interviewer and Bob Mortimer answers the questions.

Radio Times review

This was the rarest of comic beasts: half a dozen standalone episodes with jokes that weren't laid out on a plate, but instead jumped out from corners or tripped you up during awkward pauses. It was written by League of Gentlemen alumni Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, and performed by them in various guises alongside the likes of Timothy West, Helen McCrory and Gemma Arterton. It was dark, of course, but otherwise deliciously unpredictable: the first was about an uncomfortable engagement party; the second was a silent comedy with slapstick from Charlie Chaplin's great-granddaughter, Oona.

Over on Sky Arts 1, some light relief from Psychobitches, one of the best new comedies on TV last year, though given its tiny home, few people actually got to see it. It's a sketch show set in a therapist's office, in which famous (dead) women from history tell psychiatrist Rebecca Front their troubles. The first series was a knockout - Julia Davis played a wailing hybrid of Pam Ayres and Sylvia Plath; the Brontë sisters were foul-mouthed, filthy puppets obsessed with sex, and Sharon Horgan played a campy Eva Peron, who clung on to her bottles of "boobles". It was silly, and odd, and very funny.

This second series is almost as good, though it feels more like a traditional sketch show and is slightly patchier, perhaps due to the sheer number of writers (I counted 12 on the credits for the first episode of this double bill, and seven on the second). In the best sketch, Kathy Burke and Reece Shearsmith play the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret as crude and grotesque, glugging down booze as Burke repeatedly rejects her on-screen offspring with delicious cruelty. Morgana Robinson joins the cast to play a sloppy Anna Nicole Smith - hers is a masterclass in physical comedy - and there's a musical skit featuring Unity, Decca and Nancy Mitford, as imagined by Horgan, Samantha Spiro and Sophie Ellis Bexter. In a sketch the Mail has already called "hideous", Michelle Gomez has gone from Doctor Who's Missy to an even more terrifying villain, playing Thatcher as a Hannibal Lecter-style monster, incapable of love. It's at its finest when it's upsetting the establishment, and it relishes its naughtiness.

The second episode was less sharp. Perhaps, given its hyperactive pace, it works better in single doses. But I loved Horgan as Carmen Miranda - "Of course I'm on fucking drugs" - and Sheridan Smith as a mute Sleeping Beauty, whose endless sleep has an ulterior motive. And anything that gets Kathy Burke back on our screens, even for a few minutes, is well worth our attention.

Reece Shearsmith returns to House of Fools

The League of Gentlemen star is to reprise his role as Martin in series two of Vic and Bob's offbeat sitcom.

League of Gentlemen to reunite for 20th anniversary?

Reece Shearsmith says that a collaboration with League of Gentlemen stars Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Jeremy Dyson may be on the cards.

Inside No 9: a gutsy dark comedy of misery and mayhem

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, makers of The League of Gentlemen, return with a collection of unrelated tales of morality and mortality, and a legion of ghoulish mishaps.

Inside No 9 wins at prestigious Rockie Awards

The silent episode of Inside No. 9 written by and starring Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith picked up its second award in two days at the prestigious BANFF World Media (Rockie) Awards earlier this week.

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's Inside No. 9 (BBC Two) has been a deliciously twisted treat, each tale balancing neatly on a tightrope so you were never quite sure if we were about to make the leap into comedy or tragedy. But the final numerically themed short story was unashamedly macabre.

True, the odd defiantly bad joke ('Do you know Poe?' 'From the Teletubbies?') pierced the darkness as babysitter Katy turned up for work at a house which made the Addams Family homestead look light and airy. Yet this was a briefing for a descent into hell from which there could be no escape.

The twist being - in a series which has specialised in ingenious surprises - that there was no twist. You could call that daring but it actually felt like a bit of a cop-out, as though the dark-hearted Shearsmith and Pemberton were laughing at us: 'Ha! So you thought we'd left you off the hook.' I didn't quite buy the macabre self-indulgence. But the Devil's closing howl of 'mischief!' did give me the willies deep into the night. In that respect, job done.