Inside No. 9

Having got off to a brilliant start last week, the latest episode in Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's series of self-contained black comedies is so good that it may well leave you speechless. It is the funniest, cleverest, most imaginative and original television I've seen for as long as I can remember - one of those fabulous programmes where time stands still and the world around you disappears. It stars Denis Lawson and Oona Chaplin alongside Shearsmith and Pemberton, and it takes place inside one of those ultra-modern designer homes made of steel and glass that are filled with conceptual art. And that, I'm afraid, is as much as I can say without spoiling the fun.

Inside No. 9 was nowhere near as weird as 60 million people willing two skaters they'd never met to copulate, but it was still simmeringly macabre - as you'd expect, given that it was made by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, two of the team from The League of Gentlemen. It's a series of blackly comic one-offs, a little like Murder Most Horrid. This first episode was about adults at a party playing Sardines - a game that quickly became uncomfortable for more reason than one.

The brilliance of it lay in the structure. For about 29 and a half minutes of the 30, I was thinking, "Where's this going? What's the point?" Then, suddenly, all the action happened in the last 30 seconds - making me want to rewatch immediately to see if there were clues I'd missed. It was horrible. I liked it a lot.

Inside No. 9, the new series from League of Gentlemen and Psychoville creators Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, is steeped in a love of shows like Tales Of The Unexpected and Twilight Zone.

Those classic series, like BBC2's Inside No. 9, featured standalone stories each week - most of which had a heart of darkness and ended with a ghoulish twist.

One of my earliest TV memories was watching a Tales Of The Unexpected episode called 'Lamb To The Slaughter' in which a housewife bludgeons her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds the investigating detectives the cooked murder weapon. Totally inappropriate for an eight-year-old to be allowed to watch, of course, but that's what babysitters are for.

Combining jet-black humour and the macabre is something Shearsmith and Pemberton are obviously masters of, and the first episode - called Sardines - had just enough of both to make it a joy to watch. The name refers to the party game in which guests play hide and seek and the 'finder' has to join the 'hider'.

In this case the party guests - including Anne Reid, Katherine Parkinson, Tim Key and Timothy West - all found themselves hiding in an old Victorian wardrobe.

Despite such a simple conceit (almost all of the episode took place within the confines of the wardrobe) Shearsmith and Pemberton still managed to inject the story with their trademark creepiness and dread.

They lured us in with oddball characters to laugh at but then landed a sucker punch of a finale that came with a murderous twist and allusions to paedophilia.

The freedom of anthology shows such as this allows the stories to go literally anywhere - and with Shearsmith and Pemberton at the helm, that's a scary but mouth-watering prospect.

Shearsmith and Pemberton interview each other

We listened in as these writer-actors became journalists for the afternoon. Pickled werewolf foetus, anyone?

As a big fan of The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville, I'd really been anticipating Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's new series for some time. I have to say I wasn't disappointed with the first helping of Inside No. 9, primarily due to the great writing from Pemberton and Shearsmith. The script combined the two things they're best at; doing namely awkward comedy and sinister conclusions. The fact that at least half of the episode took part inside a wardrobe was a bold move but one that worked brilliantly. I have to say I laughed almost all of the way through and the duo make you anticipate some of the gags before they happen, especially in the case of 'Stinky John'.

The final act of the story was expertly done and left you re-thinking what had happened once the episode had finished. While I'm a little upset that the duo aren't doing another linear series, as character progression is something they thrive upon, I think it's great that they're being allowed to experiment in this way. After having watched the second episode I can also report that it's completely different from this week's instalment apart from that sinister tone that Pemberton and Shearsmith have perfected over their time together.

Shearsmith and Pemberton's 'knock knock' jokes

In Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's latest series, Inside No. 9, each episode focuses on the murky characters behind a door marked 'number nine'. Hang on, isn't there an old joke format involving doors?

Inside No. 9 full of entertaining weirdness

The obvious inspiration was Roald Dahl's Tales Of The Unexpected and it's no mean compliment to say that Inside No. 9 held its own against Dahl's bizarre short stories.

Inside No. 9 episode 1 review: Sardines

Looking for a refreshingly different bit of British telly? Look no further than the new comedy drama series Inside No. 9.

Review: Inside No. 9, BBC Two

There was much to enjoy in beautifully nuanced performances, particularly by Tim Key and Katherine Parkinson.

It has been a long march for The League Of Gentlemen's Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith since their original (very original) TV series in 1999. With each subsequent venture they have scrambled farther over the top. Inside No. 9, a series of one-off plays each taking place at a different address starting with 9, represents a retreat to firmer ground.

Last night's debut was much less fantastical than their last series Psychoville, free of prosthetics and cross-dressing. It dealt, as per, with incest and abuse, but in the manner that Alan Ayckbourn might. The Greek ruled that plays should take place over a single day in a single place. Sardines occurred over half an hour in a single wardrobe. It occupied a wall in an outsized family house, the scene of uptight daughter Rebecca's engagement party. Childhood momentum had propelled her and brother Carl (Pemberton), a man barely out of the closet and about to enter a wardrobe, into a game of sardines that no one wanted to play.

Katherine Parkinson's Rebecca was a superb study in congenital dissatisfaction, about to marry a man whose previous lover is not only still on his mind but in the wardrobe. The whole party ends up in there, including the dull, quiet one (beware the dull, quiet ones, they are usually the writers' surrogates). It is Carl, though, who outs the elephant in the wardrobe, a sexual assault on a child by his bullying father: "I was teaching the boy how to wash himself!" responds the father.

Anne Reid, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Anna Chancellor must have so enjoyed getting dialogue in which each sentence was minutely crafted for them. My favourite line may even have come from Timothy West as the patriarch complaining at a transgressing of sardine rules: "This isn't hide-and-go-seek". Was that posh for "hide and seek" or a unique verbal corruption?

Sardines was a disciplined comedy, but a little bit of discipline, as one of the League's perverts might say, never did anyone any harm. Save for the Tales of the Unexpected twist, I loved it.