The Cutprice Guignol

So, when I’m writing my Inside No. 9 reviews, I make up a draft for each episode before it comes out. And, for the better part of the last year, there has been an untouched draft sitting in my blog, smugly staring back at me whenever I come to write a new post: an unwritten review of the Inside No. 9 episode Hold on Tight!

As I was writing about the actual episode that broadcast in this slot, 3 By 3, last week, I was once again faced with the reminder of that Hold On Tight! article I so lovingly formatted and prepared and never got to publish. And I figured now would be as good a time as any to finally do something with that bloody draft, and write a brief history of how this fake episode came to be (and whether or not it might actually exist).

The first sniff we got of this episode came in February 2023, with Hold On Tight! listed amongst the episode promos for the upcoming eighth season of Inside No. 9. A few promo images showed Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton alongside guest star Robin Askwith dangling cheerfully out of a period-appropriate British bus from the 1960s. “Wolfie and Clarke love their bus – but perhaps not as much as the mysterious Mr Cole and his dolly-bird nieces,” read the episode description. “As Clarke would say, ‘plenty of room up top!'”

With the inclusion of British sex comedy icon Robin Askwith, it looked as though the show would be producing a parody of raunchy On The Buses-style comedy – delivering on the long-awaited Bus Episode. A strange thing for fans of a show to want so badly, some might argue, but for Inside No. 9’s odd and exceptionally flexible little premise, I totally got why: maybe I’m even a Bus Episode truther to this day, but we’ll get to that. The show has taken on so many seemingly impossible settings only to turn them into some genuinely brilliant slices of horror; they’ve done it on a train, done it in a car, why not do it in a bus (the very same words I spoke to my high school girlfriend before she dumped me, strangely enough)?

But little did the unsuspecting audience know that the show was ready to pull one out of the bag on us. In reality, Hold On Tight! served as a cover for another episode, and never really existed. And, as per Inside No. 9 rules, what we got was far, far more horrible than what it had first seemed.

On 18th May, 2023, with Hold On Tight! listed all over the BBC as filling the Inside No. 9 slot that night, an announcer’s voice let us know that a replacement would be broadcast instead: a quiz game led by panel show stalwart Lee Mack. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, you should – even if you don’t know the show particularly well, it’s an enormously fun and effective piece of found footage horror, with a great performance from Lee Mack and a convincingly low-budget quiz show atmosphere. And some people’s heads explode! What’s not to love?

Obviously, it was a pretty risky move throwing out this episode that is, for the first ten minutes or so, very convincingly a not-very-good BBC quiz show. Plenty of people switched off or were, just in general, exceptionally baffled by the replacement, but it didn’t take long for viewers to clock the unsettling atmosphere and giveaway in the title (3 x3 = 9, for those similarly number-useless as me), and for things to take a suitably gory turn.

The episode had actually been in production alongside the rest of the series in strict secrecy – the cast and crew had to sign NDAs covering the true nature of the episode broadcast in this slot, and sound designer Chris Mac spoke on Twitter about creating the episode’s very specific atmosphere and backdrop. Audiences for actual BBC quiz shows were asked to react in horror to unspecified nastiness for use in an as-yet-unnamed show, and the production crew worked to add in lighting sounds and other genre-appropriate sound effects to really sell the quiz show feel. Even staff who spotted Lee Mack recording dialogue in post-production were convinced that it was for a new quiz show instead of the true horrible intentions of the Inside No. 9 production team.

Robin Askwith joined Shearsmith and Pemberton for a faux-promo shoot, and the stage was set for 3 By 3 to shine. It was such an enormously fun episode to enjoy with the rest of the Inside No 9 fandom, dissecting all the little hints and details right as the episode came out to try and parse out the truth of it; it felt like such a uniquely Inside No. 9 twist, dangling a much-requested premise only to rip it away and replace it with something utterly unpredictable. A piece of meta-storytelling wrapped up in a genuinely great slice of horror, 3 By 3 was a worthy replacement.

But, much like buses in the UK, there was a part of the fandom was sure that we were going to get two secret episodes when we hadn’t even expected one to turn up. A week after the apparent end of the eighth season of Inside No. 9, a previous episode, Mr King, was listed for broadcast. Some speculated that Inside No. 9 might be preparing to drop the actual Hold On Tight! in this secret slot, and waited with baited breath…

Only for it to just be Mr King. Oh, well. There’s still some discussion in fan spaces about whether or not this episode actually exists and will see the light of day, and I have to say, I doubt it – but, at the same time, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see them put it out when we least expect it. Inside No. 9 is synonymous with the twist, after all. It would be sort of a brilliant one to have us all thinking we had outsmarted them and figured out when it was going to be released, only to respond with a po-faced head-shake, and then to release it after all of that. I lean towards no, but I also lean towards “I have no idea what Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton will do to see themselves out in this final season”, so it’s all up for grabs.

Finally, I can put this draft about Hold On Tight! to bed, just in time for the final season of Inside No. 9 in a couple of months. Did you watch 3 By 3 when it came out? How did you find this fake-episode twist? And do you think Hold On Tight! might one day see the light of day? Let me know in the comments!

 If you liked this article and want to see more stuff like it, please check out the rest of my Inside No. 9 reviews.  I’d also love it if you would check out my horrible short story collection, and, if you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

(header image via Beyond the Joke)