The Inside No. 9 Halloween live special will be its twenty-fifth episode. That’s some achievement – twenty-five entirely new scenarios, characters, casts and locations. Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith aren’t stopping there though. A brand new series is also on its way to BBC Two, due to air in 2019.
Series five is currently still in the writing stage, a process Pemberton describes to assembled press at a mid-October photoshoot as very sociable. “We always like to be in the same room, which a lot of writing partners don’t. We live very close to each other so we have a little office and go to the same places for our lunch and we spitball a lot of ideas for a long time.”
Shearsmith agrees. “There is a lot of talking before we begin, so we make sure where we are going and that there is no fat on anything before we start writing. That’s really helped us over the years. We really know what we want to get out of a story before we write it.”
Having dipped into multiple genres already in the anthology series, there are still styles the pair want to try out. “We’ve got a few of them in series five,” says Shearsmith. “There are some things in that that are going to be very challenging.
Is it getting tougher to come up with new and innovative ideas for episodes?
“I think what is harder,” says Pemberton, “is that when you have pulled a number of surprises, and really have genuinely shocked people, it is hard to continually do that. We don’t want to feel the pressure that we always have to do that, but then when we don’t, people go ‘it’s a shame it didn’t have a surprise at the end’.”
“It does keep us on our toes and we have to work very hard to make sure that this doesn’t become an ordinary half-hour. Our aim for the series as a whole is for people to think ‘my God I have never seen anything like that.’”
“It is a lifetime of material,” adds Shearsmith. “One of them, I always think ‘God, that could be a whole series’ rather than just one half-hour. But that’s why we can reach the heights in the stories that we’re able to, because it is concluded that week. You couldn’t do the same thing if you had to reset for next week and start again with the same thing. It’s the curse and the pleasure of it that you can reach very extraordinary conclusions.”
Pemberton continues, “It’s good for the audience as well, because you don’t know when you’re watching it who’s going to live and who’s going to die. Anything could happen and that puts the audience on edge.”
Five series in, Shearsmith describes the show’s relationship with its audience as “adversarial”. “They’re sat there like ‘right then, I’m going to get this [twist]!’ and you mustn’t do that because sometimes we don’t do that. It’s not all about the last thirty seconds, it’s the journey getting there and thinking of a good story that hooks you in.”
Dead Line, the Inside No. 9 live Halloween special, airs on Sunday the 28th of October at 10pm.