Steve Pemberton Talks Inside No.9 Series 5

The long wait for series five of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s award-winning Inside No.9 is almost over. After more than a year of waiting for the fifth series lands on BBC Two in February. We’ve not seen a new episode since the inspired live Halloween Special from 2018, speaking to Pilot TV, Pemberton revealed that series five is very much a back to basics approach.

“We thought we’d avoid doing anything like that and go back to just telling stories. In the new series we’ve got an episode about football; I’ve had this idea for a long time for an episode set in a referee’s changing room before the game, during half time, and after the game.

This time, we’ve got this very different episode in which we used improvisation a lot, trying something very naturalistic which didn’t hinge on plot, and that was a reaction to our own work. It’s a very simple idea: an advent calendar counting down 24 slices of life in a normal family.”

Pemberton hinted that the format will be further subverted with an episode that features six monologues to a fixed camera. “That felt very new for us because of the simplicity of it.” A sixth series has already been ordered which will film later this year.

Inside No.9 has proved to be the perfect platform for the comedy duo with each episode offering a new story and fresh characters. I’ve been a massive fan of these guys since The League of Gentlemen first hit the radio waves. Their first project together post-League was the criminally under watched Psychoville. While I adore the anthology style, I hope they revisit a longer narrative creation at some point in the future.

Inside No.9 is available to stream on Netflix and BBC iPlayer.