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Good news Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton fans – Inside No 9 series six is on its way!

by 32 Comments

One of the most consistently excellent shows on UK TV these
last few years

Teaser now up on YT.

Anyone here looking forward to this as much as I am?

1

Comments

  1. ..and they’ve only got bloody Adrian ‘Ted Hastings’ Dunbar in that trailer! Marvellous. Right now, off the top of my head, my favourite to date is the Crossword episode.

  2. If you had to choose a favorite episode from each series/season, what would you pick?

    Mine would be

    Tom and Geri (S1)
    12 Days of Christine (S2)
    Diddle Diddle Dumpling (S3)
    Bernie Clifton’s Dressing
    Room. (S4)
    Love’s Great Adventure. (S5)

    Found it very, very hard to whittle it down to one on each series

    • Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room is my absolute favourite. An unqualified masterpiece, brilliantly written and acted. I’ve thought about it often since watching it.

      • The great thing about Inside No 9 is you can revisit each episode and notice loads of little details you may not have noticed first time around – the many paired items in Diddle Diddle Dumpling for example

      • Seconded. It’s the only episode I’ve watched, rewound and watched again straight away. It’s just brilliant.

        12 Days of Christine comes a close second. That’s the first one I watched because of a recommendation, I think, on here. Those League of Gentlemen fellows are very clever chaps. I really enjoyed Mark Gatis’s series about horror films, but there were only a few episodes. I’d have preferred a 26 week run!

  3. I’ve realised, via Wikipedia, that I’ve never seen series one, so there’s a bonus!
    Impossible to pick one from each of the other seasons, but stand-outs for me are:

    The 12 Days Of Christine
    Cold Comfort
    The Bill
    Riddle Of The Sphinx
    Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room
    Diddle Diddle Dumpling
    Once Removed
    Thinking Out Loud

    Like you say, there’s always more to be spotted in what I believe film studies students would call the mise-en-scene. Wonderful stuff, and, frankly, superior overall to the Tales Of The Unexpected/Hammer House Of Horror fare of the 70s and 80s.

  4. The 12 Days Of Christine might be the best 30 minutes of TV I’ve ever seen. One of those things you’d love to be able to see for the first time again.

  6. Inside no 9 was also made on much, much tighter budget than Black Mirror – a fact Reece and Steve ingeniously make work to their advantage.

    In Cold Call, they use a single location (a call centre) and shoot pretty much everything on the CCTV or in-computer cameras you’d find in such a place.

    On the grampus xmas episode at the start of S3, everything was shot on 70s cameras that had been dumped in BBC storerooms and hadn’t used for years.

    In the unlikely event anyone here didn’t know this already, the working title for the show was apparently Message in a Bottle. A ‘bottle episode’ is a TV production term used to describe a show shot towards the end of a series when the remaining production budget – and possible ways to use it – were very, very limited

  7. Goody gum drops! You’ve reminded me, in this drought season of watchable telly now that University Challenge and Only Connect have finished but the summer stuff hasn’t started, that I have all five previous series of this stashed on the pooter to watch. How wonderful! Off to the sofa….

  11. Well I have just watched Bernie Clifton’s dressing room based on this thread, and it’s a bit good isn’t it? Another for the ever-increasing “to watch” pile.

  12. Hmm. Did everyone else find that as effortful and unrewarding as I did? Every episode is different of course, but that was a very strange choice to open the new series.

  13. I was a bit disappointed, but given they have such a high hit rate, there’s bound to be the odd clunker. Am sure there’ll be.one (or maybe two) stunning ones later on to compensate.

    Thought the Alaska gag was pretty good, though

    • There are fan accounts on Twitter wetting themselves over how wonderful it was, and saying they laughed and gasped and shook their heads in wonder at its brilliance. Fair enough. If they say they did then I can only assume that they did. The premise (a heist scenario played out as commedia dell’arte, with lots of fourth wall business, for those who haven’t seen it) was undoubtedly clever, but I don’t think it was funny at any point. Then again, I don’t like clowns.

      • I found it funny. I enjoyed its cleverness too. Though, Inside Number 9’s cleverness can often swamp the humour, I thought the episode used self-deprecation to subvert itself pretty well. The ‘recap’ being the best example. It’s a fine balance.

        Motherland was brilliant!

        • I caught Motherland while I was waiting for No. 9 and thought it was excellent – I think it’s on Netflix now, so I’ll try to catch up with it – though there’s a recurring pattern of BBC shows being dropped from Netflix after you’ve committed to them.

          As for Inside No. 9 – I liked it well enough – the cleverness and 4th wall breaking made it interesting. An episode for those already familiar with the show. I was trying to convince the Mrs and youngest daughter to join me and I’m glad they declined as I doubt they would have being won over to it on this episode.

  14. Well last night’s was much better, and with Motherland Inside Number 9 is forming one of the week’s best hours of television. This one was a Tales of the Unexpected style story (complete with entirely expected plot twists) and while it might not have been as ambitious as the series opener I thought it more successful.

    • Agreed.

      Hugely enjoyable skewering of social media obsessives which like all INo9 eps will be well worth watching for a second and maybe even third time.

      Given that RS seemingly most often plays the unpleasant types (e.g. LOG’s Ross Gaines and Geoff Tipps), interesting to see SP take the role of the nasty guy here. (Not that he doesn’t have form, as anyone who saw his chilling recreation of Tony Martin from a couple of years back will remember)

  16. INN is just so consistently good at shifting tone which is so incredibly hard to do successfully.
    Black Mirror is an anthology show, but when they try do so one episode within the whole series where the tone is different everyone loses their sh*t.
    Shearsmith and Pemberton are such good actors (and writers) that they can change tone continuously within a single story.
    Having ice breaking jokes helps, but it’s only part of the craft.

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