Inside No9 creators ready for a new TV show

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are ready to create a new long-running TV show once ‘Inside No9’ finishes.

The pair’s black comedy anthology series comes to an end in 2024 after nine seasons, and after spending 10 years writing one-off comedy episodes, Reece and his writing partner are ready to return to a longer format in which they can give their characters a longer story arc.

Appearing on the 'Scarred For Life' podcast, he said: “It’s just been me and Steve in a room for 10 years doing all these stories. We’re in them of course and that gives it continuity. We are proud of it, the very fact that we’ve got this far in. They’ll be people who will say it should’ve stopped at Series 2 but we’re very happy at the amount of invention that we’re still injecting into them, I think that’s we would have stopped if we thought we really can’t keep it up. The opportunity is lovely, each week to have a clean slate. That’s the tyranny as well, of course, because you’re then left with how do you do it again next week.

“One of the good things about it is that you can have these great highs and people can die and have extraordinary endings. In the world of six half hours about the same thing everything has to reset of course, you can’t really have these huge main characters dying on these things.

“I think if we ever do anything else after this, which I hope we will, it will be an interesting exercise to do longer storytelling because we’ve done 28-and-a-half minutes for 10 years so it would be nice to try to flex our muscles and do something that is on a bit longer in the way it tells its story. A bit more like a big narrative. ‘Psychoville’ was really a reaction to doing ‘The League of Gentlemen’ for so many years and sketches, so we thought let’s do an ongoing story and then we went back to play for today, that’s really what the Number 9s are.”

Reece, 54, also confirmed plans for an ‘Inside No9’ stage show starring him and Steve, 56.

He said: “There’s a few things that will be coming out.

“We’re gonna do No9 and there’s talk of a live stage version of No9. So it won’t go away for a while because we have plans to do a live version of it, somehow, on stage.

“So that will be exciting because we will have to embrace that it’s live in whatever way we can to make it different again from the TV.”