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"A Quiet Night In" - Episode 2 of Series 1 of Inside No. 9 - Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton have always been at the forefront of avant-garde TV comedy (League of Gentlemen, Psychoville), always experimenting with form and content in strange and different ways. In their mini-series, Inside No. 9, they restrict themselves even more than usual. Each episode is self-contained, both in the way that they stand alone and that each one takes place in one location, a house or some sort of living space, Number 9. In each episode, Shearsmith and Pemberton provide an invasive vignette inside of someone’s life, and usually, each one culminates in a morbid as well as morbidly ironic fashion.

“A Quiet Night In” restricts itself even more by its lack of spoken dialogue. It is an art heist gone wrong and a relationship completely dissolved. These two storylines revolve around each other and as the characters from each side of their story come into more contact with the other, more lives are lost and more comedy is had! The two veins of comedy explored in this episode come in the forms of extreme melodrama and awkward slapstick on the part of the two bumbling thieves. Each is offset by the other: the heavy classical music that works for the relationship story is out of place in the art heist and the way the violence of the art heist bleeds subtly into the melodrama and vise versa – the placement of the knocked out housekeeper, the ultimate death of the husband character, and the murder of the dog.

The first act of violence comes in the form of animal cruelty (7:00). In his confrontation with the dog, allergic Steve Pemberton eventually hurls the dog across the room until it hits the window with a whimper. Here is an easy to understand difference between violence in comedy and violence in drama: a character whacks another character’s head with a baseball bat. Depending on the sound that is made (a gooey crack or a Looney Tunes-esque slider whistle noise), the audience is cued in to whether they should laugh. In the case of “A Quiet Night In,” the cues come in a different form. The dog’s whimper is funny enough in a very cruel way, but it is in the atmosphere of the shot and the stiff reactions of Shearsmith as he stabs the dog down with an umbrella and of Pemberton as he stares morosely on with a buffoonish look plastered to his face. All of this accompanied by the surging melodramatic score tells us that this is funny, in a very tragic and horrible way.

The way that the characters express themselves in this silent episode is crucial to the comedic timing of the entire piece. After their fight on the couch (11:00), the couple exchange melodramatic expressions of longing, hate, and annoyance reminiscent of an old silent film or of Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood in Singin’ in the Rain. Pemberton and Shearsmith use complex hand signals and facial expressions as well as text messages as a vehicle for their humor, which match their situation and their bumbling antics. The complete diegetic sound in the episode renders the silence even starker as other non-human characters in the episode are able to vocalize, and the silence is finally shattered with the deaths of all of the original characters. The final irony of the episode comes as the hit man takes the paper-towel-aluminum-foil artwork instead of the ruined original floating in the pool.

The acts of violence in this episode of Inside No. 9 read as comedy not only because of the absurdity of each situation but also because of the duality of the A- and B-plotlines. What is set up to be more violent – the home invasion – fails to deliver completely until the end, and the more domestic, soap opera is the one that surprises he audience, and the one more packed with mystery. The violence of this episode is completely contained within the house, an after-effect of the form of the show, and it is difficult to see it existing outside of this episode. No one succeeds, especially the last survivor, and because of that, there is no winner, or no one who truly gains from the violence. Perhaps that is why it is almost easier to laugh at it after the fact, no matter how cruel some of the deaths are.

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