The Cutprice Guignol

Well, we’re back!

I know I said I was going to give it a while before I jumped back into Inside No. 9, but, since the finale a few weeks ago, there has been a hare-shaped hole in my heart that I simply cannot wait to fill. I will, of course, be continuing with my other recapping projects alongside this one (for all you psychosexual car lovers out there), but I honestly just really want to get into Inside No. 9 again. I love this show from the bottom of my heart, and writing about it has been an enormous amount of fun, as well as a great opportunity to really get into the writing and storytelling of Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton, and the various excellent directors who’ve helmed it over the years. I’ll be recapping each season over the course of the next six months or so, till I catch up with the start of my recaps at the beginning of season six, and I hope you’ll join me for a wander through TV’s finest anthology horror.

All of that to say: cram yourselves in a cupboard, and let’s play Sardines. Now, I’ve already chatted a bit about why I think this opening episode is still one of the best the show has ever done, but it bears repeating that this is a fucking outrageously good opening to the show as a whole. I remember seeing this when it came out, having been a huge fan of The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville growing up, and being so taken aback by what a shift it felt like from the rest of their work up till that point; still capturing that distinct, strange, twisted, and witty tone, but with a level of polish that spoke to how far they were into their careers.

Taking place in a single bedroom (well, and an ensuite bathroom) of a country estate as a posh engagement party has a good British Little Bit of Bloody Fun, Sardines is a locked-room mystery of sorts – it’s just that we don’t find out what the actual mystery is until the final seconds of the episode. Which leaves, in the meantime, a lot of unsettling build-up, and some of my favourite character work across the show’s entire run (which is really saying something).

This is, if you’ll excuse the pun, a packed cast – Anne Reid, Tim Key, Katherine Parkinson, Anna Chancellor, and, for all you unfortunates who grew up on Skins as a teenager like me, even Luke Pasqualino, amongst many others, and, despite the limited runtime, there’s a real effort to fill out these characters and relationships. Sardines is a story of class as much as it is one building up to the twist that we see at the episode’s end, and I love the way these dynamics are explored over the course of the story – Steve Pemberton and Katherine Parkinson, as the adult children of the family who own the house, move through every scene with this mixture of taut, horrible tension and cliquey in-jokes that speaks to the confines placed on them as a result of the pressurizing social expectation as much as it does the ways they’ve benefitted from the exclusivity of their upbringing. Anne Reid (my beloved, truly, fresh from gumming some coke in the bathroom) as part of the household staff is permanently on the outside of the conversation, while Luke Pasqualino, an outsider, tries to navigate the complex family bullshit simmering just beneath the surface.

But there are two characters who hang over the story under their arrival in the third act: Daddy (as Katherine Parkinson insists on referring to him, played by Timothy West), and Stinky John, an offscreen character who, at one point in his childhood, just stopped washing himself. While it’s not clear until the final few moments of the episode exactly what their connection is, it’s peppered in from the start, and when it hits, it’s grotesque: the patriarch of the family, Andrew, sexually abused John as a boy, leading to trauma that drove him away from cleaning himself as a result of the memories inflicted on him.

It’s a really tough topic to take on this early into the show, but it’s one that I think the episode pulls off pretty much perfectly – that slow drip-feed of information from people who’ve encountered John, the gossip and casual cruelty aimed at him as a result of what his trauma drove him to do, and the eventual reveal that he’s actually been in there from the start (played by Tim Key), basically brushed off by everyone as he has been over the course of his entire life. I appreciate any story that finds a way to explore stories of sexual abuse and assault without going into explicit depictions of the act itself, and here, the story concerns itself with the aftermath – it’s dark, undoubtedly, and in a show that makes use of black comedy as much as this one, it could easily have slipped into the offensive or unpleasant, but it’s pitched just right for me.

Of particular note to me is Timothy West performance here; he’s got a commanding presence that’s prickly in such a way that you can totally understand why nobody dared question him about the obvious abuse he carried out in decades past. Given that I’ve mostly watched him doing those great canal journeys with Prunella Scales, it’s striking to see him so abjectly, unapologetically nasty – and to see the way the community (literally in the cupboard, and more broadly out of it) has grown so crookedly around him as to find ways to deny, ignore, and cover for what he did.

And then, of course, John locks them all in the cupboard and burns them alive. It’s a brutal ending, an unfair one, given that a lot of people in that cupboard didn’t know about his abuse, but an undeniably satisfying one – as twists go, it’s a great start to a show that would become virtually synonymous with them.

I still think this is one of the best episodes of the show’s whole run, but that doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to getting into the rest of season one – I’m planning to post these reviews every Friday, so if you’d care to join me on a watch-a-long, you know when to aim for! What do you think of Sardines as an opening episode for the show? How does it stand up over ten years since it first came out? 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 BBC)