The Cutprice Guignol

The happiest of happy new years to you, my fellow Inside No. 9 fanatiques! I hope your Hogmanay was a bloody good time for all involved, and, now that we’re into 2025, I can get back to Inside No. 9 – with their brilliantly ambitious Halloween special, Dead Line.

Dead Line is one of those episodes that might as well have been made especially for me (though not my dad, who, upon trying to watch it, was convinced that he just had a bad link due to the audio cutting out and turned it off after ten minutes). The found footage elements, the proto-analogue horror teases, Shearsmith and Pemberton playing the most bitchily luvvy versions of themselves imaginable – it hits on so, so many things I love, it’s hard to know where to start.

Well, I guess the premise would be a good place, right? In what is apparently a live broadcast of an episode of the show, things start to take a turn for the worse when the sound goes out and the live performance is suspended – only for backstage CCTV and previous BBC productions to accidentally fill the airtime instead, as ghost of Granada Studios past start to haunt both the set and the sets alike.

It’s a great idea, and a fun way to exploit the show’s more horror-centric side – without losing the bite of the usual black comedy in the process. I’m a huge sucker for seeing actors play versions of themselves (one of the reasons I enjoyed the finale, Plodding On, as much as I did), and Inside No. 9 had been around for long enough at this point to have established tropes and a reputation that Shearsmith and Pemberton (in perhaps the most unflattering wig of the entire show, an impressive feat in itself) thoroughly enjoy skewing along with themselves. I could honestly have watched hours of them just dicking around backstage while they complain about co-stars and do impressions of comedians from years past; it’s like a direct shock of serotonin straight to my brain, every time.

But, you know, this is a Halloween special after all – so is it actually scary? For me, it totally is, in the way other British classics like Ghostwatch manage to be. The ghosts linger at the edges of the frame, inviting you to come in for a closer look – bare glimpses in the backdrop of classic like A Quiet Night In, or reflections in the mirror. It’s got that sense of a classic ghostly chiller to me, and, if you know me at all, you know that I will never, ever, in my life get enough of it.

What this episode does best, for me, is how it crafts a found footage story out of real-life broadcasts by the BBC from years past. I’ve written a little before about why I believe the future of really effective found footage is stories that invade and overlap with the real world in an unsettling way. And that’s exactly what Dead Line does. The way the ghostly figures invade previous episodes of the show, seeing “real” versions of the creators who have come to define almost every episode of Inside No. 9, even using the BBC announcer as a conduit through which to deliver ghostly whispers and distortions – this episode takes the safety of the real world conceits that usually serve as an indicator that we’ve got nothing to fear, and twist them into paths through which these spirits can reach us. It’s sensational. It’s perfect. I get excited just talking about it; I love meta-horror that plays with the fourth wall like this, and to see one of my favourite shows do it with such skill and panache is everything I could ask for.

Dead Line is about the most delightful way to kick off the Inside No. 9-ing for this year I can think of, but I’d love to hear what you make of this episodes in the comments below – did you see it when it came out? What do you make of it in retrospect? 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 Radio Times)