Psychoville

Psychoville episode seven: Ravenhill

It seems almost all of us who've watched Psychoville have really enjoyed the series. There's much to be said for anything that can frame its decisive moment of murder and high tension with a song from Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat. The costumes, dialogue, locations and, to an extent, the plotting were pitch perfect. No other British comedy has been as enjoyable this year.

Psychoville has a Marmite effect on viewers: the story of a group of grotesques bought together by menacing notes, it reached an ingenious conclusion last night. Mr Jolly the clown was revealed as the puppeteer, Eileen Atkins was the sadistic matron of the asylum where all the characters were once resident (and where the wannabe serial killer David first struck - Atkins's nurse his victim, after a vicious series of electric shocks). Each character, every line, was cannily, cleverly drawn, toilet humour dovetailing with jolting pathos - and there's nothing like an explosion for a cliffhanger.

Psychoville 1.7 Review

The finale to this idiosyncratic black-comedy was a mixed bag and possibly Psychoville's unfunniest episode. It tried to pull everything together into a fitting conclusion and didn't totally succeed (it even joked about how its plots haven't gelled correctly), before unwisely leaving us with the setup for another series that, to be frank, didn't feel necessary or earned...

Psychoville episode 7 review

Hmm. Well, that was a disappointing ending, certainly on a comedic level, to what has undoubtedly been my personal highlight of the BBC's broadcasting calendar thus far in 2009.

Psychoville - Series 1, Episode 7 Review

After the thrilling tempo last week, this one takes a little time to get started. It kicks off with a scene in a Citizens Advice Bureau that seems out of tone with the series. But then that shows why so many have been against this: it's not what they expected. But how could you expect things like the brilliant Rope pastiche, or the serial killer song-and-dance routine, or Dawn French being so absolutely terrifying? Truth is, the show has no constant tone and is all the more kickass for it. Anyway, the end is nigh and it even has an ending . . . sort of.

Previewers were asked specifically not to reveal the ending of this bizarre and wonderful series. Fair enough - although the ending is so strange that not many previewers would be able to give it away even if they wanted to. Under the circumstances, I'm hanging on desperately to what little I know. There is an outrageously funny scene tonight when the serial killer tries to confess his crimes at a Haringey police station, which was very similar to my own experience a few years back when I tried to hand in a wallet at Wood Green police station. The programme goes on to provide invaluable advice on how to cure Paradise Syndrome, which can afflict anyone who suddenly finds himself with everything he ever wanted. As for the rest - well, heaven only knows what was going on. But it was imaginative and brilliantly acted, and I loved every sick and confusing moment.

Twenty-five minutes of patient build-up culminate in a curiously hurried pay-off as the horror-comedy-thriller reaches a gruesome climax tonight. Amid cross and double-cross, David, Joy, Mr Lomax, Mr Jelly and Robert are all drawn back to the scene of their crime tonight, together with their respective hangers-on (literally, in Mr Jelly's case) to face the world's most incompetent blackmailer.

To say more would spoil things, but rest assured that Eileen Atkins & her motivating tool, a cattle prod ("I don't know how Trevor Nunn does it..") have a part to play.

The clash between the nightmarish and the workaday once again finds another perfect setting when David is locked into a dispute with the Citizens Advice Bureau over whether his murders were all committed in the same borough. And so what if the ending is a bit scrappy? At least it leave enough threads dangling for a richly deserved second series.

Psychoville: the end is nigh!

Reece Shearsmith provides his thoughts on the finale of Psychoville (don't worry, no spoilers).