Steve Pemberton

Those masters of the dark arts, the former League Of Gentlemen co-stars Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, return with a second instalment of their deliciously macabre shorts, the first series of which won best comedy performance at the Royal Television Society awards last week.
Like a Tales Of The Unexpected for the 21st century, each perfectly formed 30 minutes offers a masterclass in storytelling: witty, imaginative, inventive and suspenseful - with a clever twist at the end for good measure.
The six tales are linked by the number nine and in the opening episode, La Couchette, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Mark Benton, Jessica Gunning and Jack Whitehall join Pemberton and Shearsmith on board the sleeper train from Paris to Bourg-Saint-Maurice. They're a motley collection trying to get a quiet night's sleep as the train makes its way across France, but as the sleeping compartment fills up, the chances of that begin to look highly unlikely...
The setting for future episodes include a séance in the grand Victorian villa, a modern-day family get-together, a 17th-century village witch trial and a volunteer call centre, with Alison Steadman, Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks, Paul Kaye and Tom Riley among the cast. Special mention must go to Sheridan Smith, however, for her performance in next week's offering, The 12 Days Of Christine, a powerful, moving story of one woman's rocky journey through life. It is an absolute gem, one of the best things I have seen on television this year.

For Reece Shearsmith, whose collaborations with fellow writer and actor Steve Pemberton include The League Of Gentlemen] and Psychoville, there's something irresistible about the dark side of life. "Whenever we've tried to do anything lighter, it doesn't feel complete until we've added some darkness", says Reese, who co-wrote Inside No. 9 with Steve. "The tales are not always horrible - but then again, maybe our threshold of what's horrible is very different from everyone else's!"

Their new collection of surreal stories opens in the No. 9 carriage of a sleeper train in France. Jack Whitehall, Waterloo Road's Mark Benton and former Corrie star Julie Hesmondhalgh are among the passengers trapped for one night on a journey that takes a chilling turn.

"The thrill is that viewers never quite know what's happening," says Reece, 45. "Each episode starts with its feet on the ground, and the scenery looks familiar. That's how we lull you. You think: 'I've seen this before' - and then suddenly it turns into something you definitely haven't seen before. We hope that's what makes Inside No. 9 more arresting."

Jack Whitehall on Inside No. 9

Jack Whitehall had absolutely no hesitation in saying "yes" the moment he was offered a part in the second season of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's latest inspired comedy series, Inside No. 9.

Steve Pemberton: Reopening the doors Inside No. 9

Steve Pemberton, writer and actor for shows such as A League of Gentlemen, Psychoville and Benidorm, talks to BBC Writersroom about his upcoming 2nd series of Inside No. 9. A dark comedy anthology which he co-writes/co-stars in with Reece Shearsmith.

Inside No. 9 series 2: Pemberton & Shearsmith's genius

Here's a spoiler-free look at what to expect from the second series of Steve Pemberton and Reese Shearsmith's glorious Inside No. 9.

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton on Inside No. 9

"We wanted to do something that was a reaction against the box set culture", says Reece Shearsmith's co-cretaor Steve Pemberton at a press conference to launch the second series.

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.

Steve Pemberton on quitting Benidorm

Steve Pemberton has spoken of the "difficult decision" to leave Benidorm alongside his on-screen family.

Mapp and Lucia was phenomenal, successive nights of the most deliciously moreish television made last year. The adaptation by Steve Pemberton of E.F. Benson's exquisitely flensed comedy of manners, set in Rye in the 1920s/30s (and it really is still that lovely), when a certain rarefied form of life actually depended on a bustling church noticeboard for its every social, spiritual, ethical, sartorial and sexual sustenance, could have been carried by the eponymous leads alone for the whole three nights.

Miranda Richardson, with the help only of a subtle set of comedy dentures, was Elizabeth Mapp, and Anna Chancellor sublimely haughty as Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas: two women - ladies, actually, in a day when distinctions mattered as mattered life or death - caught in endless twitching frenzies of one-upmanship, all whispered eyebrows and quietly toxic putdowns. Richardson in particular was again phenomenal; her silent lipsticked mouth spoke volumes. It was rainbowed and beaming when happily and hissily besmirching her "friend" with the sarcastic term "precious one", or even when genuinely happy, high on unkindness, after a rare coup: but its cochineal would plummet, in repose, to a clownish moue, a faded curtain of dried lip-lines rusted with frustration. But Chancellor was no slouch; even though she won 90% of the battles, when scorned her wrath was ungovernable, and would have had 90% of ovaries (and every testicle around) fleeing for the Downs.

As I said, they could have carried it themselves, but there was glorious support. Pemberton himself as proto-gay Georgie; Poppy Miller and Mark Gatiss and Nicholas Woodeson, and Rye itself. The plots, such as they were - a dodgy Indian guru, an art competition, a something involving the Prince of Wales - were negligibly delightful. But the subplots - the mutating fashions for friendships, brief fads, the power of money, benign unacknowledged homosexuality, misappreciated appreciation for what passes for intellect (or class), the joy of witchy bitchiness - never more relevant. E.F. Benson left a little more of a canon than this: please, bring it on, and leave Downton looking like the Titanic after the feet got damp.