Quick-witted inside story

AS MUCH as I love watching TV, I quite like doing other things as well. So I do tend to display a certain bias, I must confess, towards shows that keep things nice and brief. Ones which do their thing – tell their story, cook their food, sing their songs, or bang on about whatever it is they feel the need to bang on about – in half an hour or so, leaving me time to go off and enjoy other fun pursuits, such as walking the dog, reading a book or having another go at unblocking the sink.

Also, from a creative point of view, it’s bound to focus the mind, being told you have 30 minutes’ airtime and that’s your lot.

No room for fluff and padding and various other kinds of selfindulgent nonsense.

Personally, I’d have imposed that constraint on the makers of Game Of Thrones, rather than let it drag on for 73 episodes, each a fortnight long. Honestly, do these TV people not realise we have lives to lead?

Of all the shows I admire for their consistent conciseness, my favourite by far is still the weird, wonderful, darkly comic anthology thingummy INSIDE NO. 9, which is back tonight (BBC2, 10pm).

Its creators, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith – joined in the opening episode by their old League Of Gentlemen chum Mark Gatiss – are absolute masters at establishing a scenario, introducing characters, bedding them in, allowing events to unfold, weaving in some fine gags, then rounding things off with a nicely unsettling twist – all in less than half the time it takes to bake a potato. This first story – also guest-starring the brilliant Diane Morgan of Motherland fame – finds them as old university friends, reuniting for what proves to be a rather odd river trip.

Also tonight we have the final part of ANYONE CAN SING (8pm), the Sky Arts series in which six quite tremendously tone-deaf people have been learning how to hold a tune, courtesy of the ENO (that’s the English National Opera, not the over-the-counter antacid, although I daresay the latter might help).

They’re now preparing for the event this has all been building up to, where they’ll perform to a packed house at the London Coliseum, alongside the cast of Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore.

First, however, they need to get fitted for their costumes.

And while they mostly find this jolly exciting, one of them, Khadijah, sounds unsure about the voluminous hooped skirt they want her to wear.

“I feel like a lampshade,” she sighs. Luckily, the nice lady doing her fitting is quick to dispel such a silly notion.

“Most people,” she gently assures her, “feel like toilet roll covers.”