Horrible Thoughts Reviews: Inside No.9 - Live: Dead Line
Please excuse the rather punctuation heavy title, because today we're going to go back to the Halloween special of the quirky Inside Number 9 called Live: Dead Line, and there was honestly no way I could type out all that in a blog title without looking like I've got something stuck to the colon button on my keyboard.
Last time on Horrible Thoughts, we looked at the work of former League of Gentlemen actor/director/writer/all-round-clever-clogs Mark Gatiss, and here we'll be spending half an hour with two more Gentlemen clever-clogses, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, who both write, direct and act in every episode of Inside Number 9. If you've not seen any of the series, it's an anthology in which each episode is a stand-alone story, usually with at least one surprising twist. The stories are varied in tone and setting, the only link is that each happens "inside number 9", which could be a room, a house, a floor, or even a date. I'd recommend checking out the rest of the series before sitting down to watch this episode, because this one gets very meta.
It opens ordinarily enough, we're told by an announcer for BBC2 that this is a live broadcast, and we start with Steve as Arthur Flitwick, an elderly man who has found a lost phone in a graveyard. But after a few minutes of genuinely funny dialogue, the sound cuts out. Now, watching this on iPlayer probably spoilt the gag a bit for me, I'm sure a lot of people watching live would have been reaching for the remote at that point.
As the show goes on, we're told by the announcer that the BBC is experiencing "gremlins" and we cut to the first season episode A Quiet Night In before the whole thing becomes a channel-flipping, CCTV-watching Ghostwatch of an experience. The action cuts between mangled clips of a fabricated Most Haunted episode, some older-looking footage of an accident on-set, and a series of CCTV-style shots of the set of the "live broadcast" and Reece and Steve bumbling around their dressing room. The bits in the dressing room are some of my favourite with them musing about whether they'll get repeat fees, gossiping about news stories, and getting updates on the fact their conversation is on the telly via a What'sApp message from Mark on "the League What'sApp Group", which incidentally I do hope is real. One clever bit of dialogue has them telling Twitter uses to "fuck off" for wondering if "this is all part of the twist", which is a nice Ghostwatch-esque touch.
Ghostwatch, incidentally, is the parallel that sprung to my mind on first viewing, so much so that I think I may have shouted it at the screen, which probably annoyed my housemates a little. At this point it might be a bit too obvious a reference, but though this is not quite as innovative a programme as Ghostwatch (which was so effective in its blurring of reality and fiction that the BBC's switchboard was overwhelmed with 30,000 furious and terrified callers, and a backlash so fierce that it has never aired again since its initial broadcast back in 1992), it definitely hits some similar beats, particularly in the possession of character actress Stephanie Cole and her eerie proclamation that "technology makes them stronger". There's a definite echo of the technological seance from 1992 and anything that reminds me of Ghostwatch is doing something right, because, if you haven't guessed by now, I love Ghostwatch. Maybe I'll do a Horrible Thoughts retrospective on it or something at some point.
All-in-all this is an excellent addition to the series. With a mix of off-beat humour, genuinely unsettling sequences, and inventive fourth-wall rearranging, it'll surprise you as much as it spooks you. If you get invested in the story of the hapless Mr Flitwick, don't worry we get to see the end of his story. We also get three or four other, darker, tales intertwined. I still have no idea whether any of it was actually performed live, but when watching on iPlayer it doesn't really matter other than as a conceit.
Four possessed TV personalities out of five. Now excuse me, I have to decide whether I want re-watch Ghostwatch or re-binge the entirity of Inside No 9.
