Inside No. 9: Dead Line

Spoiler alert: this blog post gives away essential plot points but not the conclusion.

This is the blog post for Halloween and is about a show which hasn't appeared here before. Inside No 9 is a black comedy anthology series created by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith of The League of Gentleman and Psychoville, both of which you must watch immediately, if you haven't already. Each episode has a new situation and cast, and incorporate a plot twist, twisted humour or horror. Dead Line was the 2018 Halloween special. In fact you wouldn't believe the trouble this blog post has given me, perhaps because it's such an odd episode of a rather twisted show.

Before the show broadcast a synopsis was released to the press:

'When Arthur Flitwick finds an old mobile phone in his local graveyard, he makes the mistake of trying to contact the owner, but some mysteries are best left unsolved and as Halloween draws near Arthur is plunged into a nightmare of his own making.' (Source: Wikipedia)

However, cleverly, that is not what the show is about at all. It starts off like that, but the broadcast rapidly goes wrong with technical problems and mysterious things happening.

We see snatches of other shows, including Most Haunted investigating the Coronation Street set. We see behind the scenes of Pemberton and Shearsmith talking about what a disaster it is in their dressing room, and suspecting that their discussion is actually being broadcast. We see bits of one of the first series episodes of the show. We hear strange whisperings and hear the announcer scream. We see the wonderful Stephanie Cole who guest stars with a magnificent cod Irish accent, getting a strange phone call. We see the filming going even more wrong than it was to start off with.

In no time everybody is at sixes and sevens and it just gets incresingly freaky as the show goes on. It becomes apparent that the drama is actually about the studio they are in and it's all fairly horrific.

This is an excellent drama which surprisingly does take repetition because it pulls no punches.

I just have one criticism which is about the subject of ecclesiastical vocabulary which surely isn't that difficult to get advice about.

I think my favourite bit is Stephanie Coles's character who is intentionally set up to be acted badly with no understanding of motivation and plot. In fact in many ways this show is a train wreck but it's a master class in a train wreck done by experts.

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