An Inside No. 9 episode – the camera slowly pans across the dimly lit room, revealing no more than a flickering candle, a swinging chandelier – and an unmistakable sense of dread.
The deliciously macabre world of TV series Inside No. 9 was created in 2014 by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. Now, 55 episodes later, it’s widely recognised as one of Britain’s most iconic and unpredictable dark comedies.
Pemberton’s fascination for the unexplained began in childhood.
“For me, I’ve always loved puzzles, riddles, and playing games with expectations.”
Now, you’d never suspect this Lancashire-born, BAFTA-winning actor and writer to have such a deep-rooted interest in the mysterious. Yet his work on Inside No. 9 reveals a masterful knack for capturing ambiguity – a talent sparked by the films he watched in his youth.
“I used to watch quite a lot of horror movies even though I wasn’t supposed to, and things which had an unexpected ending stuck with me a lot more than things that were wrapped up neatly and answers were given.
“You’re actively engaged with what you’re watching, and I liked exercising my creative imagination on these things.”
It’s only more recently that advanced CGI technology has allowed an intensely gory and nightmare inducing genre of horror to emerge. However, two films that stuck with Pemberton from a young age and still packed a mighty punch, were 1970s classics, The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now.
“In both of these films, it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that evil prevails. The baddies win and that’s the simplistic way of putting it.
“It just leaves you so bereft that the hero you’ve been with the whole time doesn’t save the day, which is the traditional way of telling stories.
“Another one was Hammer House of Horror, which was a series of one-off horror plays that were on in the 80s and 90s. Similarly they had these really astonishing endings.”
Pemberton’s interest in ambiguity was not only nurtured by horror films, but also by his childhood readings.
This further contributed to his love of storytelling and the unexplained.
“I used to get things like Arthur C. Clarke’s magazines, where he would talk about UFOs and aliens and does Bigfoot exist and yeah, that was really enjoyable.
“That felt like conspiracy theories for entertainment, and you could enjoy the narrative element of it.
“I’m certainly really interested in mysteries, but it’s more the narrative possibilities of enjoying a story and a mystery.”
Pemberton clearly enjoys subverting traditional story narratives in his work, as Inside No. 9 so often demonstrates. His signature style is his tendency to leave things open ended – something the team at MindFckd absolutely revel in.
“It’s a big part of what people remember. I’ve always enjoyed it as a reader or as a viewer, and we wanted to give that same feeling to people watching the show.
“So much TV and media now, people do double-screening. You watch it with one eye and another eye is somewhere else.
“It’s very easy to dip out of something if you think you don’t really have to give it your full attention.”
Inside No. 9 thrives on psychological intrigue and plays with audience expectations, often making episodes entirely unpredictable. But Pemberton is mindful that this approach can shape the viewer’s experience.
“As soon as you expect a twist, it can be a little bit reductive in that you’re only thinking about that, you’re not thinking about the story. But when you get something that works really well as a twist, it makes you want to go back and reconsume that piece of media.”
It’s not just the endings of Inside No. 9 episodes that make it so captivating, it’s the storylines themselves – rich with psychological horror, laced with themes of urban legends and sprinkled with eerie coincidences.
Essentially, imagine if your favourite spooky bedtime story grew up, put on a button-down shirt, and became a clever, darkly amusing version of itself. It is now a Steve Pemberton extravaganza.
“We’ve been lucky enough to have a blank canvas for each single episode, and so we don’t have a prescriptive way of doing it.
“We don’t have a format or formula that we stick to, so we just feel it organically what the story should be.”
Many Inside No. 9 fans favour Pemberton’s technique of pulling the rug from under your feet, again and again, and the free rein that comes with writing the show allows for complete creative freedom.
“To one extent, we think the audience will be ahead of us and therefore have to subvert that.
“We take it on a case by case basis really, otherwise it just becomes too reductive that people are only thinking about the endings.
“If you can make yourself surprised, then that’s a good sign it will then hopefully make the audience surprised as well.”
But creating such an unpredictable show comes with its challenges.
Time constraints when filming the episode ‘Diddle Diddle Dumpling’ forced Pemberton and Shearsmith to cut the ending, sparking a massive online debate between viewers.
“It ended with this note of ambiguity, and people were jumping to all sorts of different conclusions. Purely because these episodes have to be 30 minutes, we’d shaved the ending off, meaning it was ambiguous not because we tried to be, but because we had to be.
“So yeah, it’s really fun having the carte blanche with Inside No. 9 to do different things every week.
“I think it’s unique to scheduled broadcast television as opposed to streaming, where you can put on a programme when you want and what you want.”
Pemberton takes his creative freedom even further by blurring the lines between fiction and reality, and admits to creating audaciously good real-time tricks on viewers.
The episode ‘Deadline’ deceived viewers watching live into believing that the show had gone wrong due to technical issues.
The stunt was a success. People quickly took to social media to discuss what was happening, seemingly integrating the audience into the cunning world of the show.
“It really worked. I believe about a fifth of the viewers turned off because we went so far with it. We made it so believable and realistic, and it’s a big risk for a TV show to want to lose viewers in that way.
“People were watching the show after Inside No. 9 to see if we’d had something up our sleeves.
“It really thrilled me. The narrative was not just what we wrote, it was what was happening with the viewers.”
However, Inside No. 9’s taste for mischief didn’t stop there.
In 2023, a fictional episode named ‘Hold On Tight’ was advertised, with a fake trailer and promotional photographs. The episode was never filmed – nor intended to be – making for a cheeky hoax that left fans reeling for answers.
“I just loved the conspiracies. It’s really fun to play with people’s expectations in that way. It was very fun to create our own little conspiracies amongst the fanbase.”
This trick generated a bracket of fans that still believe the episode exists.
“They call themselves the buzz-truthers, and I’m gonna let them believe that.”
The term buzz-truthers was coined shortly after the hoax, with ‘buzz’ referring to the online attraction generated by the stunt, and ‘truthers’ being a term typically used to describe people who believe in conspiracy theories.
Ryan Barclay, 25, from Glasgow, Scotland, is part of this curious group of viewers, and has been a fan of the show since 2017.
He became deeply involved in the ruse when word of the mysterious episode circulated in a Facebook group he was in.
Ryan says: “There’s just no way that you would do trailers and photos and allow hype to build on social media to then let the fanbase down.
“I also think the very idea of ‘hold on’ tells you about patience and just waiting things out, so there’s an entire plot here about waiting for the episode.
“I joined a few Whatsapp groups and Facebook pages about the show. I have also looked on maps to try and understand anything about where the trailer was filmed.
“I think that the episode exists but only for those who are willing to put the effort in to find it.”
This genius trick created a ripple effect on the show’s cultural impact, and further enhanced its legacy of deception.
Speaking with Pemberton, his fascination with the wonderfully wicked proves to be contagious, fuelled by the ongoing success of Inside No. 9.
“We enjoy giving our brain a bit of a workout, and I think what people enjoy is the fact that you have to concentrate.
“It absorbs the audience in a way that maybe some other stories don’t.”
We’ve been gifted with a show that astonishes, haunts and excites in equal measure – it’s no wonder we can’t get enough of it.
However, the MindFckd team can’t help but wonder: in a world where people believe pigeons are spies and the Royal family are lizard people, is Inside No. 9 actually not bonkers enough?
The camera steadily pans away from another thrilling tale, the flickering candle now gone out, leaving a delicate coil of smoke unfurling gently upwards towards the now still chandelier. It’s clear that Pemberton has mastered the art of modern storytelling, cementing the show in BBC history.
And even after all 55 episodes, just when you think you’ve finally figured the show out, Pemberton will be there playing puppet master with your expectations, long after the credits roll.
