TV review: Inside No. 9 – ‘Sardines’

Two years since twisted comedy series Psychoville ended, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton have returned to our screens with their new project: darkly comic anthology series Inside No 9.

British television hasn’t seen a mainstream anthology series for decades.

A common format in the sixties and seventies, they fell out of favour with the powers that be as viewers came to yearn for familiarity, and the comfort of sitting down with the same faces and places, week after week.

A tool of efficient and devastating story-telling, anthology bestows a rare freedom to write a piece with a singular target, whether its fancy is to amuse, affect, or horrify.

In both comedy and horror, so many great ideas are undermined by stretching them too thin. Creating a collection of stand-alone yarns allows a concept to be whittle it down to its purest, sharpest form.

An anthology series done well is like a collection of unique, magnificent diamonds.

Lifelong fans of the anthology series, and absent from our nightmares too long, who better than Shearsmith and Pemberton to raise the format from the dead?

As one half of The League of Gentlemen, Shearsmith and Pemberton created sketch-show grotesques with ever-surprising and unstated emotional clout; as hilarious as it was abhorrent, League was a comedy with a life-long love of horror at the centre of its misshapen heart.

Series opener Sardines drops us into a bedroom in a country house, where the game of the title is taking place during an engagement party.

As guests begin to squeeze into an armoire, their relationships are slowly revealed via agonising small-talk and caustic bickering.

There are no torture-porn antics here, no vest-wearing, ever-texting vampires. This is real-life terror; occupying a small space with people you don’t really know.

Family secrets and overwrought relationships gradually unravel in just a few square feet, interwoven with perhaps surprisingly broad humour. With the action playing out in a single location in real time, Sardines is an exquisite exercise in ‘less is more’, but nevertheless, delivers a gut-wrenching twist.

Subtle and disciplined, laden with biting humour and occasional barbs of unsettling suspense, its cleverness is laid bare in the cold light of post-revelation day.

Performances from more comedy faces than you’ll know where to place are perfectly pitched, with special nods going to Pemberton for his performance as uptight, catty Carl, and poet Tim Key, whose dry IT nerd provides some of the more discomfited laughs.

And as the casket lid closes on Sardines, the true beauty of the anthology series is revealed; which No 9 will we be visiting next week?

Who knows. But as long as Pemberton and Shearsmith are behind its doors, we’ll surely be in for a treat.