What do you think?
Rate this book
Inside No. 9: The Scripts Series 4-6
Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's darkly comedic creations are an endlessly dazzling masterclass in storytelling. Inside No. 9: The Scripts features every episode from Series 4-6 of the award-winning BBC2 anthology, including the live Halloween special and an original foreword for each series from the show's creators.
384 pages, Paperback
Published October 11, 2022
15 people are currently reading
45 people want to read
About the author
Steve Pemberton
27 books44 followersSteven James Pemberton is an English actor, comedian and writer, best known as a member of The League of Gentlemen with Reece Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss, and Jeremy Dyson. Pemberton and Shearsmith also co-wrote and appeared in the sitcom Psychoville and the comedy-drama Inside No. 9. His other television credits include Doctor Who, Benidorm, Blackpool, Shameless, Whitechapel, Happy Valley and Mapp and Lucia.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 24, 2023
I think one of the reasons Inside No 9 affects me so much is the recognisable ordinariness of it.
I seem to have, I’ve noticed recently, a complicated relationship with the ordinary. It keeps cropping up in my writing as something characters resent, or have allowed to wash over them too much, such that they have lost their true paths in life.
My Dad really liked a book called Embracing the Ordinary. David Foster Wallace talked about treasuring “regular guy” traits. In town this evening, the bars were full of drunk men singing Queen, John Denver, Jon Bon Jovi. But I just can’t do it.
It’s why I can watch ridiculous horror films, but the work of Alain de Botton is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Why, yes, I know The American Office is so endlessly entertaining that you can just put it on repeat, but I refuse. I can’t put on anything made by Ricky Gervais anymore. And you know, for all he exalts the virtues of the mundane, he certainly escaped them?
Ordinary details–with which Inside No 9 is shot through—fill me with dread, depression, irritation, resentment, guilt. I’ll make no claims that this is rational, but I will explain where these reactions come from.
Dread and depression: relishing the basic, embracing the ordinary seems somehow like giving up. Like saying, “The pre-existing is enough for me.” (Interesting that, “Your best is good enough” is a healthy reaction to your own performance, but it sounds too close to embracing the ordinary for me to allow it to myself.)
The irritation and resentment come from how un-customisable culture used to be when I grew up. Westlife was gonna be on your TV because you only had four channels (until there was a fifth, which resoundingly sucked. Just played B Movies where all the actors were called “Johnny” Something. Softcore porn in a pre-internet era, yes–but heterosexual.) Doesn’t matter if you fucking hate Snow Patrol or Coldplay, they will be playing everywhere. Every time I’ve heard “Hello” by Adele or “Angels” by Robbie Williams has been against my will. And it’s a lot.
Guilt, because I suspect a hatred of the ordinary may be tied into a class snobbery. The Royle Family was a popular TV show was it not? Or Only Fools and Horses or Dinnerladies or One Foot in the Grave. I never saw any of them, just many clips in adverts, none of which made me laugh. But I couldn’t relate to it. It wasn’t my family, and class probably has a lot to do with that.
For whatever reason, I assumed most others hated popular music as much as I did, but how could it have been propelled to such high listening figures, why would it have been playing everywhere, if that was true? Looking back over a lot of things–I realised just how much culture was “designed for others.” Kings of Leon and Biffy Clyro and Queen and Abba and whatever the fuck were playing everywhere, seemingly all the time, because people liked them. People didn’t go to football games just to please their dads; they were actually into… whatever the fuck they were all doing on that pitch for the loooongest 90 minutes of your life, plus extra time, oh dear God… Others weren’t watching Harry Potter drunk and ironically. (Seriously, pints of wine snuck into the cinema.) No one seemed to need nearly as much alcohol as I did to make social gatherings tolerable. They may even have been—shock!—drinking to enhance the fun they were already having! There was far less about their environments they would change if given the choice. Indeed, by being the majority, they had made the choice on my behalf. They had designed social environments in a way that isolated me.
Counter-culture does this in its own, possibly more annoying way. How much time I have spent listening to Radiohead, waiting to get it! Animal Collective and Panda Bear! The dubstep of Skull Disco! Silver Jews? Iron and Wine? Of Montreal? Patrick Wolf, Fever Ray? Give me a break. How much time it took me to actually enjoy David Lynch’s films! All the time I wasted wanting to enjoy them too much to do so! And I still haven’t seen Herzog’s “Aguirre” because it was the favourite of some snobby hipster dude I met a whole lifetime ago. Who knows if it really was, or he just wanted to be heard saying it?
The mundane, the bland, the popular, all seem synonymous–omnipresent, alienating and something from which you should escape.
I treasure not ordinariness but originality, which is ill-advised, because how are you supposed to do that? Being ordinary, that is something you can be. Being original… maybe not. But recognisable details are then not something I treasure but something I want to escape from.
Inside No 9 is dark as is, without these details: Quality street, lamb bhunas, spaghetti hoops, Blankety Blank, The Krankies, watching The Proms. They’re thrown in–I’m not sure why? Do they reassure or relate to their audience? Pull the audience into more recognisable worlds so as to affect them more emotionally? I don’t think it’s done with any mockery or derision. In “Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room” for example, there does seem to be a celebration of hideously unfunny comedy. But what’s my need to hate easy laughs? My dislike of ordinariness compounds with a dislike of the part of myself that reacts this way. Anyway, these details might instil a fondness in an audience that only serves to disturb me even further.
I’d like to forget all the time spent trying to be like others. Singing along to “Don’t Stop Me Now” or “Money for Nothing” at parties. Eating kebabs. Watching Jerry Springer. A consciousness polluted with shit I don’t necessarily dislike–or didn’t at first–but I certainly didn’t understand it, and grew to resent how much time I was meant to spend around it.
Now I live in Norway and people leave me alone. I’m living the dream! All I’ve ever wanted was to be left alone. Norwegians have this bizarre attitude that, having made friends at school and with coworkers, they’re not “open to new relationships.” Ah, as if the human heart had a quota! The stuff of poetry, that idea is. How we must envy the Norwegians that their cups all runneth over! (Then what’s with all the suicides?)
Even as I type all this, I think, “Ah Leo but you are only joking of course. You know eventually you will need to return to the way everyone else does things.” Because “the way others do things” and “healthiness” have been unhealthily intertwined in my head as a result of being–not even that different. Just a little bit. But in the face of an aggressively bland mainstream culture, a little goes a long way.
My dad was a perpetually grateful man, his personality forged as a wee boy and perpetuated onwards. He enjoyed his fried breakfasts, kept his childhood friends, loved visiting his mum.
My mum, though, must have despised how she was raised. She grew up working class and used the term synonymously for things she didn’t like. She wore what she called “fuck you” jewellery. “Working class” was instilled in her like an identity from a young age and became something she either claimed to be above or donned every now and then like a costume, if it helped her fit in. Or if she was low and it felt inescapable. On one of her final days, high on anaesthesia, she said, “Sometimes you just know there’s stuff you’d fucking hate even if you never do it.” She held a finger up proudly and said, “I’ve never skied! I’ve never skied.” And she never did.
Perverse as I know it must seem to some, that attitude is what I truly find worth treasuring. But I’ve found it helpful to be more quickly empathetic to people with differing identities in these times that so confuse others. If someone tells me who they are and what they need, I trust that they’re the experts on it, and I’ll give it to them, no questions asked. Those are your pronouns? No problem. You don’t like physical contact of any kind? You’ll get none from me and zero gentle encouragement to start incorporating it into your days. I’m not ever convinced that what will improve someone’s life is for them to do, be and say more of what is pleasing everyone else.
So yeah, typing all this out I realise I’m a champion of autonomy and originality above embracing the ordinary. Even though I suppose the ordinary is something we cannot ever truly escape, and that we all must be ordinary to some extent–it isn’t where I ever want my focus to lie. And I don’t think it’s something I will ever joyously embrace.
Now we live in this atomised, highly individualised culture, where films can have hundreds of millions of dollars in their budget and you can not have heard of them whatsoever. Where–I guess there are still “music charts” but I have no idea what’s on them. I write, and I read, constantly. I’m doing it right now! Then I’m gonna go get another book and read some more. I barely stop to do other activities. But I have NO IDEA what has come out this year, who’s popular, who’s the next big name, whatever. These days I’m amazed that TV is still a thing. With the channels and all that. I watch Netflix or nothing.
I can see then the function this ordinariness was serving the whole time, as a glue binding strangers together in their shared love of it. I’m somewhat sad for others that they don’t have it anymore. But I’m not that fussed, because it was never mine.
I seem to have, I’ve noticed recently, a complicated relationship with the ordinary. It keeps cropping up in my writing as something characters resent, or have allowed to wash over them too much, such that they have lost their true paths in life.
My Dad really liked a book called Embracing the Ordinary. David Foster Wallace talked about treasuring “regular guy” traits. In town this evening, the bars were full of drunk men singing Queen, John Denver, Jon Bon Jovi. But I just can’t do it.
It’s why I can watch ridiculous horror films, but the work of Alain de Botton is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Why, yes, I know The American Office is so endlessly entertaining that you can just put it on repeat, but I refuse. I can’t put on anything made by Ricky Gervais anymore. And you know, for all he exalts the virtues of the mundane, he certainly escaped them?
Ordinary details–with which Inside No 9 is shot through—fill me with dread, depression, irritation, resentment, guilt. I’ll make no claims that this is rational, but I will explain where these reactions come from.
Dread and depression: relishing the basic, embracing the ordinary seems somehow like giving up. Like saying, “The pre-existing is enough for me.” (Interesting that, “Your best is good enough” is a healthy reaction to your own performance, but it sounds too close to embracing the ordinary for me to allow it to myself.)
The irritation and resentment come from how un-customisable culture used to be when I grew up. Westlife was gonna be on your TV because you only had four channels (until there was a fifth, which resoundingly sucked. Just played B Movies where all the actors were called “Johnny” Something. Softcore porn in a pre-internet era, yes–but heterosexual.) Doesn’t matter if you fucking hate Snow Patrol or Coldplay, they will be playing everywhere. Every time I’ve heard “Hello” by Adele or “Angels” by Robbie Williams has been against my will. And it’s a lot.
Guilt, because I suspect a hatred of the ordinary may be tied into a class snobbery. The Royle Family was a popular TV show was it not? Or Only Fools and Horses or Dinnerladies or One Foot in the Grave. I never saw any of them, just many clips in adverts, none of which made me laugh. But I couldn’t relate to it. It wasn’t my family, and class probably has a lot to do with that.
For whatever reason, I assumed most others hated popular music as much as I did, but how could it have been propelled to such high listening figures, why would it have been playing everywhere, if that was true? Looking back over a lot of things–I realised just how much culture was “designed for others.” Kings of Leon and Biffy Clyro and Queen and Abba and whatever the fuck were playing everywhere, seemingly all the time, because people liked them. People didn’t go to football games just to please their dads; they were actually into… whatever the fuck they were all doing on that pitch for the loooongest 90 minutes of your life, plus extra time, oh dear God… Others weren’t watching Harry Potter drunk and ironically. (Seriously, pints of wine snuck into the cinema.) No one seemed to need nearly as much alcohol as I did to make social gatherings tolerable. They may even have been—shock!—drinking to enhance the fun they were already having! There was far less about their environments they would change if given the choice. Indeed, by being the majority, they had made the choice on my behalf. They had designed social environments in a way that isolated me.
Counter-culture does this in its own, possibly more annoying way. How much time I have spent listening to Radiohead, waiting to get it! Animal Collective and Panda Bear! The dubstep of Skull Disco! Silver Jews? Iron and Wine? Of Montreal? Patrick Wolf, Fever Ray? Give me a break. How much time it took me to actually enjoy David Lynch’s films! All the time I wasted wanting to enjoy them too much to do so! And I still haven’t seen Herzog’s “Aguirre” because it was the favourite of some snobby hipster dude I met a whole lifetime ago. Who knows if it really was, or he just wanted to be heard saying it?
The mundane, the bland, the popular, all seem synonymous–omnipresent, alienating and something from which you should escape.
I treasure not ordinariness but originality, which is ill-advised, because how are you supposed to do that? Being ordinary, that is something you can be. Being original… maybe not. But recognisable details are then not something I treasure but something I want to escape from.
Inside No 9 is dark as is, without these details: Quality street, lamb bhunas, spaghetti hoops, Blankety Blank, The Krankies, watching The Proms. They’re thrown in–I’m not sure why? Do they reassure or relate to their audience? Pull the audience into more recognisable worlds so as to affect them more emotionally? I don’t think it’s done with any mockery or derision. In “Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room” for example, there does seem to be a celebration of hideously unfunny comedy. But what’s my need to hate easy laughs? My dislike of ordinariness compounds with a dislike of the part of myself that reacts this way. Anyway, these details might instil a fondness in an audience that only serves to disturb me even further.
I’d like to forget all the time spent trying to be like others. Singing along to “Don’t Stop Me Now” or “Money for Nothing” at parties. Eating kebabs. Watching Jerry Springer. A consciousness polluted with shit I don’t necessarily dislike–or didn’t at first–but I certainly didn’t understand it, and grew to resent how much time I was meant to spend around it.
Now I live in Norway and people leave me alone. I’m living the dream! All I’ve ever wanted was to be left alone. Norwegians have this bizarre attitude that, having made friends at school and with coworkers, they’re not “open to new relationships.” Ah, as if the human heart had a quota! The stuff of poetry, that idea is. How we must envy the Norwegians that their cups all runneth over! (Then what’s with all the suicides?)
Even as I type all this, I think, “Ah Leo but you are only joking of course. You know eventually you will need to return to the way everyone else does things.” Because “the way others do things” and “healthiness” have been unhealthily intertwined in my head as a result of being–not even that different. Just a little bit. But in the face of an aggressively bland mainstream culture, a little goes a long way.
My dad was a perpetually grateful man, his personality forged as a wee boy and perpetuated onwards. He enjoyed his fried breakfasts, kept his childhood friends, loved visiting his mum.
My mum, though, must have despised how she was raised. She grew up working class and used the term synonymously for things she didn’t like. She wore what she called “fuck you” jewellery. “Working class” was instilled in her like an identity from a young age and became something she either claimed to be above or donned every now and then like a costume, if it helped her fit in. Or if she was low and it felt inescapable. On one of her final days, high on anaesthesia, she said, “Sometimes you just know there’s stuff you’d fucking hate even if you never do it.” She held a finger up proudly and said, “I’ve never skied! I’ve never skied.” And she never did.
Perverse as I know it must seem to some, that attitude is what I truly find worth treasuring. But I’ve found it helpful to be more quickly empathetic to people with differing identities in these times that so confuse others. If someone tells me who they are and what they need, I trust that they’re the experts on it, and I’ll give it to them, no questions asked. Those are your pronouns? No problem. You don’t like physical contact of any kind? You’ll get none from me and zero gentle encouragement to start incorporating it into your days. I’m not ever convinced that what will improve someone’s life is for them to do, be and say more of what is pleasing everyone else.
So yeah, typing all this out I realise I’m a champion of autonomy and originality above embracing the ordinary. Even though I suppose the ordinary is something we cannot ever truly escape, and that we all must be ordinary to some extent–it isn’t where I ever want my focus to lie. And I don’t think it’s something I will ever joyously embrace.
Now we live in this atomised, highly individualised culture, where films can have hundreds of millions of dollars in their budget and you can not have heard of them whatsoever. Where–I guess there are still “music charts” but I have no idea what’s on them. I write, and I read, constantly. I’m doing it right now! Then I’m gonna go get another book and read some more. I barely stop to do other activities. But I have NO IDEA what has come out this year, who’s popular, who’s the next big name, whatever. These days I’m amazed that TV is still a thing. With the channels and all that. I watch Netflix or nothing.
I can see then the function this ordinariness was serving the whole time, as a glue binding strangers together in their shared love of it. I’m somewhat sad for others that they don’t have it anymore. But I’m not that fussed, because it was never mine.
November 9, 2022
I love this series so much and it's so much fun to read the scripts and see where things differ from what ended up on screen.
March 4, 2023
I really like Inside No. 9 and it was just a pleasure to read this collection of scripts. I particularly enjoyed the foreword to each series as it gave insights to the writing process and set each story in its real world chronological and cultural context.
I always find it a joy to revisit the stories and remember what made me laugh or made me think each time. Sometimes I find a motivation for a character’s action that I hadn’t noticed when watching the finished programme. It’s also interesting to see what Pemberton and Shearsmith have intended as sometimes I as a viewer have interpreted events differently.
I genuinely haven’t any complaints about this book. Loved it. Five stars. Will read again (probably along with an episode, eagerly telling my husband about the stage directions at every moment).
I always find it a joy to revisit the stories and remember what made me laugh or made me think each time. Sometimes I find a motivation for a character’s action that I hadn’t noticed when watching the finished programme. It’s also interesting to see what Pemberton and Shearsmith have intended as sometimes I as a viewer have interpreted events differently.
I genuinely haven’t any complaints about this book. Loved it. Five stars. Will read again (probably along with an episode, eagerly telling my husband about the stage directions at every moment).
May 20, 2024
The scripts of eighteen blackly comic original genre-bending stories written by the masters Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith.
This collection in particular includes some of my favourite episodes of the show including (but certainly not limited to) Once Removed (S4E3), Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room (S4E2), and the highly underrated Last Night of the Proms (S6E6).
These tales of terror inspire me to pursue a career in writing and in acting and it is a shame that the show will be ending in June. Long live Inside No. 9!
This collection in particular includes some of my favourite episodes of the show including (but certainly not limited to) Once Removed (S4E3), Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room (S4E2), and the highly underrated Last Night of the Proms (S6E6).
These tales of terror inspire me to pursue a career in writing and in acting and it is a shame that the show will be ending in June. Long live Inside No. 9!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews