LIVES

BBC TWO’S AWARDS-GUZZLING ANTHOLOGY SERIES INSIDE NO. 9 IS FINALLY RETURNING AFTER AN AGONISING TWO-YEAR ABSENCE. ITS CREATORS, STEVE PEMBERTON AND REECE SHEARSMITH, TELL ALL…

- STEVE O'BRIEN

WHATEVER AGE you are, being summoned to the boss’s office is always a nerve-shredding experience. It was that day in 2012 when Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith found themselves in the throne room of BBC Two boss Janice Hadlow, when they didn’t know if their series, Psychoville, was going to be enthusiastically renewed or brutally axed. In the event, they were told that the show, the pair’s first self-penned sitcom after the 2002 pausing of The League Of Gentlemen, was being quietly put down. Except, asked Hadlow, did they have any other ideas?

Inspired by a rogue, confidently contained episode of Psychoville (series one, episode four, if you’re looking) the pair cobbled together a pitch that would hark back to some of the spine-chilling anthology shows of their youth.

“It was a very vague notion of a show with no particular rules to it,” reveals Steve Pemberton to SFX. “We liked the idea of a limited location, a small cast and telling a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.”

It’s worth remembering that, in 2012, anthology shows had long been out of fashion. Black Mirror had blinked into existence the year before, but wasn’t yet the blazing cultural firework it is today. With no returning characters, no cliffhangers and no continuing storyline, there was, in many TV commissioners’ heads, the lingering question of why a viewer would ever bother to tune in the following week. It was an epic gamble for BBC Two, but one that would pay off handsomely.

“TV generally at the moment is very disposable,” suggests Reece Shearsmith, a long-time fan of anthology shows, “but I think with Inside No. 9 we’ve managed to make something that lingers in the mind.”