This was a screening of two of the six episodes this season, first up was The Referee's a W***er. Yes, that is how it's written on screen. This entirely takes place in the changing room for the referee, linesmen, and fourth official overseeing an important match between United and Rovers. I've mentioned before that I don't follow that much sportsball, and this episode does throw in here a lot of technical terms about the beautiful game which I didn't really know, so it's a testament to how well it's written that I understood what was going on perfectly well. Mind, that could be down to, as they mentioned in the Q&A, Steve Pemberton being very into football, Reece Shearsmith less so, so it's a good balancing act of one bringing the knowledge, the other putting it into a context anyone can understand. It even manages to structure the episode around the timing of a football game well too, giving a solid little structure to the story. You get why the game is so important, why certain characters do the things they do in relation to it, and what the consequences for the whole thing are. It's all bound up with some very human stories, tackling (heh-heh, tackle!) points of greed, professional pride, and other things that really would be going into spoiler territory.
The performances are great in this one too, with easily the key player being David Morrissey as the titular Ref, who gets one hell of a character arc over this half an hour, especially when it comes to his relationships with the players, clubs, and officials involved. Steve and Reece's parts are good too, with perhaps Reece's nerdy fourth official getting the lion's share of pure laughs, although he does get an oddly little poignant speech towards the end. This episode is all about how the role of ref has lost a lot of respect, and why it needs someone with integrity and can command a fair sense of authority, because otherwise... well, that would be telling! I'd be tempted to say there's potentially a subtle political message in here, but I don't want to put words into the creators' mouths without knowing their intentions first, and to dig into will drive past spoiler city limits. Overall, a really fun episode, one of their more "light" episodes (like The Bill or And The Winner Is...).
The next one, The Stakeout, lets you know from the off that it's one of the darker episodes; that's no spoiler, but again, can't get into much into specifics. Just for basics then, it's all in police car Oscar Nine, and is mostly a two hander with Steve and Reece as a pair of police constables assigned to a particular stake out, with the more senior one having some baggage in that his fellow constable was recently killed on duty. I'm not going to say how this turns out, but this one does play a lot of games with your expectations with this sort of set up, including directly name checking the tropes of cop movies very early on (someone's been reading TV Tropes between seasons!). In fact, the episode does a good job of playing with a lot of the familiar cliches of this sort of story, but in a different way than you might be expecting.
It's worth praising the direction in this one by series regular Guillem Morales (Matt Lipsey directed The Referee's a W***er); the whole episode is mostly two cops in a squad car for half an hour, with the camera never leaving the vicinity of that car, but it never gets dull, it's always visually interesting. At the Q&A after the screening, the creators noted that this was supposed to be "the cheap episode", but the logistics of filming on location at night did mean this one's budget crept up quite a bit. Money well spent though, because this is a fine episode, a good tension builder, although with some very funny lines in there as well. It got a great reception at the screening, a very different one to the first episode, but that highlights the real strength of this show, the variety with the episodes. If the way we were buzzing about the whole thing afterwards is any indication, I think this will be an episode that's particularly well remembered.
So, two episodes of the batch, and I can already say that Inside No. 9 Season 5 (United Nil) is must see TV. There were some nice little hints as to the later episodes too; Steve Pemberton is directing another episode which apparently will mostly take the form of YouTube monologues, that sounds intriguing. Also, there's a hint that there may be an episode even darker that The Stakeout; now I'm really interested. Definitely see the new series whilst it's on, and if you haven't yet, catch up with the rest of the series; if you like good drama, you have no excuse not to see Inside No 9, it's a wonderful selection of dark delights, like a chocolate selection box.
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