Inside No. 9

With each show being a stand-alone story, Inside No. 9 has been hit and miss. Last night's, "Nana's Party", showed a family unravelling as secrets were revealed at a birthday bash for an elderly relative.

Angela and Jim were a typical middle-aged suburban couple. Angela (played by Claire Skinner -- best known as the mum in Outnumbered) kept an immaculate home and spoke with an affected posh accent. Jim spent the majority of his time locked in his shed.

Only when Angela's brassy, alcoholic sister Carol turned up with her practical joker husband Pat did the secrets start to spill.

The party turned to farce with flatulent Nana choking on ice cubes and a strippergram arriving as drunken Carol blurted out the revelation of her affair with Jim.

Anybody used to the work of the show's writers and stars, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, will know their comedy always comes with a side order of pathos and weirdness. It doesn't always work but last night it mostly did.

Inside No. 9 season 2 episode 5 review: 'Nana's Party'

Last week, we spoke about Shearsmith and Pemberton's fascination with the quiet desperation of everyday banality. This episode takes that to the hilt - the hilt of a very big knife, in fact.

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.

TV preview: Inside No. 9, Nana's Party, BBC2

Don't bother trying to do a Columbo and second-guess what is in store. Needless to say the normal setting makes what occurs all the more disquieting.

Review: Inside No. 9, Nana's Party

Like series opener La Couchette, Nana's Party is steeped in the old Sartre sentiment; "Hell is other people."

Inside No. 9 series 2 episode 5 review: Nana's Party

What's more horrifying than vampires, psychos, or zombies? Family gatherings, as we saw in this week's Inside No. 9.

Inside No. 9 season 2 episode 4 review: 'Cold Comfort'

Like all the films in this series, the backstories will creep around the darkest corners of your mind for days afterward.

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.

Last night's tale was based on the Comfort Support Line call centre, where volunteer Andy gave short shrift to a lady droning on about her dead cat while Chloe, a suicidal teenager caller, led him to make one fatal slip.

The result? The grieving cat lady took her own life while Chloe survived (in fact Chloe had never taken an overdose and she wasn't a teenager girl either).

The story played on the idea that it's the helpers who often need the most help. Liz, Andy's colleague, who'd come for a fortnight and stayed five years, certainly fell into that category. She wasn't the most needy, though, and Chloe's identity was far from the last surprise.

Creepily brilliant, deftly done, these tales surpass all expectations.