The Cutprice Guignol

This episode, Last Gasp, falls under a very specific sub-genre of Inside No. 9 stories: The Weirdest Shit You’ve Ever Seen Happen in a Suburban Semi-Detached.

Specific? Yes, but it’s a sub-genre that this show does brilliantly, and that has brought to life some of my favourite episodes ever – Nana’s Party, Mulberry Close, Love is a Stranger, to name just a few. Last Gasp is the first of these stories in the show’s run, and, for me, still one of my favourites. Last Gasp follows Jan (Sophie Thompson, Detectorists’ secret weapon) and Graham (Pemberton), the parents of a seriously ill daughter, after a visiting pop superstar Frankie dies in their house and leaves them with his last breath in a party balloon. Soon, warfare breaks out between Graham, Frankie’s assistant Si (Adam Deacon) and charity representative Sally (Tamsin Grieg) over the potential exhaled fortune contained in this balloon.

This was probably the episode that received the most lukewarm reception when it first aired, and, looking back at it now, I can sort of see why – the critique of celebrity culture and obsession wasn’t particularly fresh, even in 2014, and Last Gasp is such a profoundly silly episode in a lot of ways that it’s hard to take any of it seriously (those shots of the balloon on the pillow never fail to make me laugh, that said). There’s no huge twist, as would become synonymous with the show in years to come, and it’s also lacking Reece Shearsmith (who I really did miss here).

But that all said, I think this is a really strong outing for the show. This is, without a doubt, the meanest episode of the show so far, and I have to admit that I have a real soft spot for these kinds of stories when they come from Pemberton and Shearsmith. They harken back to The League of Gentlemen’s pitch-black sensibilities, but they’re also really difficult stories to pull off in a less surrealist show like this one without turning it into a completely unrelatable wallow in horribleness. As well as the very average setting, which serves as just the right amount of normalcy to utterly subvert with this unpleasant, it’s the brilliant Sophie Thompson who pulls it back from total horror, softening the edges of the abject nastiness at play between most of the rest of the cast.

And with that balance, the episode really shines in how utterly venomous and monstrous the three-headed beast of Grieg, Deacon, and Pemberton get to be. There’s a great sense of escalation here, especially when the characters are faced with the revelation that Frankie is actually still alive – that shot of Deacon pressing the pillow over his face through the frosted glass window (side note: who has a fucking frosted glass window on a door?) is genuinely unsettling. The brief glimpses we get of Frankie’s career (especially those hideous WordArt CD covers) are incredibly fun, even if the glimmers of late 2000s pop sent me hurtling back in time to a school disco I would rather have left to the annals of history.

If there’s a scene-stealer here, it’s Tamsin Grieg; Sally is a truly poisonous character, and Grieg has this skill of delivering the worst, most abjectly evil lines in such a way that you don’t realize how awful they are until ten seconds later. The banality of her evil – her arguably very reasonable request that, after a lifetime of helping children fulfil their dreams, it’s her turn – is polished to an absolute gleam, Her cruelty and callousness slowly unfold over the course of this thirty minutes until she’s one of the most downright repugnant characters the show has ever created, and, all things considered, that’s impressive. Grieg might be one of the best guest stars the show ever had, in terms of matching actor and character, and hell, this episode is worth it just for her alone.

In all, I can see why this episode often ranks low on best-of lists for fans of Inside No. 9, but it’s never going to be less than top twenty in mine. Where does this episode rank for you? Are you a fan of the The Weirdest Shit You’ve Ever Seen Happen in a Suburban Semi-Detached sub-genre? 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)