Steve Pemberton

To a suburban semi, where Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith have gone a bit Mike Leigh. It's Nana's birthday party, thrown by Angela (Claire Skinner), the more successful of her two daughters. Into a house kept pristine by Angela's crippling OCD blows bitter dipsomaniac Carol (Lorraine Ashbourne). Pemberton and Shearsmith are the golf-sweatered husbands waging a cold war via practical jokes. As one prank blows up a mass of secrets, the script slides effortlessly from funny to dark to desperately sad.

Radio Times review

The praise lavished upon this anthology series from viewers and TV critics alike is justly deserved, and this episode is another cracker. In Nana's Party, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith (writing and directing) play prankster brothers-in-law who, with their wives (Claire Skinner as an OCD mum and Lorraine Ashbourne as her alcoholic sister), gather for Maggie's 79th birthday. Cue another delightfully ditsy turn from Benidorm's Elsie Kelly.

The half-hour unfolds like a micro-packaged Mike Leigh drama, with finely judged performances as secrets and lies are exposed in cosy suburbia. All it's lacking is Timothy Spall grunting.

Inside No 9 Review: Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort sees Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's dark imaginations at full rein, with brilliant technical innovations that help to invoke the story's mundane setting, enhance its narrative themes and draw out the intricate layers of the script.

The penultimate stand-alone playlet in Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's brilliantly chilly series starts with an ambulance skidding to a halt outside a house as the occupants scream for help; then we flash back to the start of the day as the family prepares for a party.

Reece Shearsmith plays an insufferable booby with a fondness for practical jokes and Steve Pemberton is his weary nemesis. Claire Skinner is the dutiful, obsessively tidy wife about to have her plans significantly changed.

Another perfectly judged high-wire walk: comedy and tragedy balanced evenly and artfully at all times.

Cold Comford was this week's Inside No. 9, the number nine in this case being the booth at a version of the Samaritans, the Comfort Support Line.

Steve Pemberton was Andy, its new occupant who quickly realised, first, that his co-workers were not folk anyone should ever confide in and, then, that he too had no talent for "active listening".

Jane Horrocks was good as the office gossip "politely encouraged to move on", but the ultimate twist was crude, and the insight that those who offer help need it most just a little banal - by this series' standards, at least.

After some star-studded shows, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith dial back the celebrity guests for tonight's episode, set in a Samaritans-like call centre. Shot on time-coded CCTV, the episode has the tools to ratchet up the suspense, as volunteer Andy (Pemberton) is drawn into both the dramas of his callers and the tensions of his workplace, as managed by supervisor George (Shearsmith). Ultimately, though, the story lacks both the plausibility and element of surprise that characterise the best of this series.

Radio Times review

More warped brilliance from the minds of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, Cold Comfort is set at a branch of Comfort Support Line as volunteer Andy (Pemberton) starts his first day listening to tales of woe from random callers. It unfolds almost entirely via footage from a fixed camera in booth nine, with other CCTV angles, increasingly important, displayed split-screen on the side. Jane Horrocks plays the snarky Liz, sitting in the booth behind, while Shearsmith is their uptight overseer.

As the calls get bleaker and Andy's sympathetic nature is sorely tested, any real helpline volunteers watching this episode may well wince, but it remains gripping throughout. And there's a creepy pay-off.

The latest in Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's superb second series of unsettling playlets, this centres around the volunteers art a Samaritans-like helpline and the newest recruit, Andy (Pemberton), who starts to receive regular calls from the mysterious Chloe. She is a troubled teenager, but is there more to her rants about an unhappy home life and threats to overdose? It co-stars Jane Horrocks, on fine form as another volunteer and the drama is shot to look as though it is being picked up on security cameras, which provides very effective for the denouement. Another corker.

Having produced two small masterpieces in a row, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith have set an impossibly high standard for themselves and it's only fair they should be allowed a breather. In tonight's episode, a volunteer (Pemberton) has joined a Samaritans-type call centre called Comfort Support Line. "Whatever the caller wants to talk about," says his boss (Shearsmith), "we offer active listening." There are two volunteers (Jane Horrocks and Nikki Amuka-Bird) who loathe one another, and the boss may be more disturbed than any of the callers. It's a promising set-up, but the episode doesn't unfold with the same simple, logical elegance as others in the series.

Inside No 9, ep 2.3 review: 'occasionally funny'

The third episode of series two fell some way short of what we have come to expect from Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith.