ON SET WITH... Steve Pemberton

Steve, 49, co-created spooky No. 9 with his comedy-drama Inside League Of Gentlemen colleague Steve talks Reece Shearsmith. Here the third us through a week filming is shot at series of the show, which the country... various locations around

3 MONDAY

It’s hard to describe Inside No. 9 to people who don’t know it. Some of the stories are broadly comic, others are more dramatic – but all involve a location with the number nine attached, normally a house or a flat but we’ve had a barn and even a train carriage. Our stories are only half an hour long, we aim to draw you into our characters’ lives so you go on a journey with them. There’s always something big at stake and we like to really turn things on their heads. It’s amazing what you can get into half an hour...

4 TUESDAY

We’re at Langleybury Mansion in Hertfordshire for the show we’re filming this week, called The Riddle Of The Sphinx. I’m a big fan of cryptic crosswords and in this episode we’ve looked at whether you can make crosswords dramatic. I play Professor Squires, my favourite character of the series, and this particular story is one of my favourites too because it’s so gothic. People will be surprised by just how much it twists and twists and twists...

5 WEDNESDAY

We’re very lucky with our guest stars. In this series we have Keeley Hawes, Philip Glenister, Felicity Kendal and Tamzin Outhwaite. This week Alexandra Roach [right, with Steve], who’s in police drama No Offence, plays Nina, who sneaks into the professor’s house in the dead of night. I’ll say no more.

6 THURSDAY

Reece and I were both doing plays when we first started writing this show and the feeling of claustrophobia you get from being in one building all day was what drove us. We’ve maintained that feeling; in most episodes the action is in real time – a minute of screen time equals a minute in the characters’ lives – and we rarely leave the room. Normally we think of the idea before we think of how we’ll work a nine into it. The only other thing that links the stories is a small statue of a hare that we place in every episode as an in-joke. See if you can spot it.

7 FRIDAY

A fourth series of the show has already been commissioned and even as we’re filming this one we’re trying to think of new ideas. The drawer is pretty empty now but we’re inspired by everything around us. One episode in this series, the one featuring Keeley Hawes, is about someone who becomes fascinated with a shoe they find in the street, which came after I saw a shoe in the middle of the road when I was walking to our office. I thought, ‘What if someone found this and became obsessed by it?’ And it became a half-hour descent into a man’s mind!

Inside No. 9, Tuesday, 10pm, BBC2.