Reece Shearsmith

First look at Psychoville

You may remember Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith most fondly as Herr Lipp and Papa Lazarou (Hello Daaaaave!), but soon the pair will have a whole host of new characters to imbed in our collective consciousness.

Reece Shearsmith blog entry

Filming was exhausting - we had very little time, for what was an incredibly ambitious project - but we are delighted with the results.

Stay tuned for the latest six-part series of Tom Collinson's slightly surreal sitcom that finds our hero, Dave (Reece Shearsmith) still living in the self-storage container of the title after the break-up of his marriage. Here he considers the great conundrum we call life in the company of, in particular, the borderline psychotic Geoff (Mark Heap) and the sensitive and cultivated security guard Ron (Tom Goodman-Hill). This much is as before. What's new for the first episode of this new series is that Dave's sister has moved into the same storage building as Dave after a series of rows with her husband. Which raises the question: given the current downturn in the economy, could storage containers be the new bijou semi?

Written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show, The Thick of It) and boasting a pedigree cast, which includes Reece Shearsmith, Darren Boyd and Rosie Cavaliero, the second in this commendable comic endeavour doesn't quite deliver the laughs you might expect. The tale of a houseshare in Victorian London, it is silly and clever and marvellously parodies the conventions, characters and cliches of Victorian fiction. With relatives on deathbeds, frustrated spinsters only occupied with embroidery and ebullient doctors, it provides some smirks but there are no laugh-out-loud moments.