The Cutprice Guignol

This Friday evening, let’s have a chill one. Get the litter trays cleaned, whack something in the oven for tea, scrape some room on the sofa between the cats, and have A Quiet Night In, you know?

If the first episode of Inside No. 9 was about playing with character, the second is about playing with form. Following a pair of hapless would-be thieves (Pemberton and Shearsmith) as they try to pinch a valuable painting from a wealthy homeowner (Denis Chaplin) while he spars with his live-in partner (Oona Chaplin), A Quiet Night In is still one of the most experimental pieces in the show’s whole run. A semi-silent comedy that plays out like something from my beloved Jacques Tati, it’s hard to believe it’s barely thirty minutes long – it’s such a packed episode, not a moment wasted, every singular detail (well, mostly, but we’ll get to that) paying off in one way or another before the credits roll.

The limits the lack of dialogue put on this story make for really creative storytelling shot through with an inherent vein of ridiculousness. I think this is one of the most straight comedy episodes of Inside No. 9 – drawing on everything from slapstick to shitting jokes to skewered dogs, it’s dripping with the black comedy that populated their earlier work in The League of Gentlemen and Psychoville. The slowly-deflating sex doll? Call me immature, but watching Reece Shearsmith plug the urethra with his thumb had me laughing for about two days afterwards.

But there’s a really nice balance in the comedy with the domestic drama playing out between Lawson and Chaplin’s characters; they’ve got an exceptionally difficult job here, to fill out a relationship with no dialogue in a matter of thirty minutes, and what they pull off is genuinely impressive. There’s a mounting sense of unease as their clash builds over the course of the episode, leading to her eventual murder, and the cold, sterile environment of the house just makes their fraught relationship look even messier by comparison.

The one thing that doesn’t work for me this episode, though, is the reveal that Oona Chaplin’s character is trans – it doesn’t have any particular payoff the way the rest of this meticulously-crafted story does, and feels more like the tail-end of another era of comedy writing than it does representative of this show’s comedy as a whole. I feel (and hope) that we’re beyond the point where “beautiful woman…has a penis?!” is a punchline, you know?

But aside from that, I still think this episode is honestly a masterpiece – an experiment with an impressive payoff, a comic playtime in form and function and farty sex dolls. Where does this episode rank for you in terms of the show as a whole? 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 IMDB)