Bevan on the box CASTS A CRITICAL EYE OVER THE WEEK’S TV
FEW things make me squeal at the telly anymore. Last time that happened was when I was living in a squat in an unlovely part of South London known locally as the Murder Mile.
On that occasion me and my flat mates were sitting down to an evening in front of the box when a slice of takeaway pizza began moving off the coffee table of its own accord.
A rat as big as a small dog, swishing a tail as thick as a skipping rope, had the crust in its mouth and was dragging it off towards the hole it had, unbeknownst to us, gnawed in the rotten skirting board.
Last week though, whilst watching
it was a different type of squeal that I emitted, although equally involuntarily, from my mouth.
The latest in Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s superlative series of short stories – entitled Death Be
Not Proud – saw Jenna Coleman’s freaked out flatsharer, convinced her new apartment was haunted, shaken by the sound of furious hammering at her front door.
Upon answering it she discovered standing there a snaggle-toothed man with an awful asymmetrical bowl-cut hairdo.
Then came the frisson of excitement among everyone watching at home as they realised it was David Sowerbutts, the serial killerobsessed mummy’s boy (played by Pemberton) from Psychoville, the dark comedy that he and fellow League of Gentleman alumni Shearsmith created in 2009.
Running for two all-too-brief series, it told the tale of a group of seemingly disparate misfits who found themselves bound together by a dark secret, with David and his malevolent, overbearing mum Maureen (played with ghoulish
(BBC2), Inside No.9
glee by Shearsmith himself) chief among them.
Maureen’s death at the end of Psychoville’s second season, it seems, had not been the end of the pair’s story – David, in refusing to be parted from her entirely, had ended up dismembering her and bricking her severed head (stored in a tasteful hat box) inside the living room wall of their flat.
The very same flat that Coleman and her partner had recently moved into.
It was a delightfully dark episode, tailor-made to delight Shearsmith and Pemberton’s faithful followers, with no end of gallows humour, in-jokes and nerdy references to everything from The Shawshank Redemption to ‘bodies under the floorboards’ murderer Dennis Nilson and the song Superman by Black Lace.
The fleeting return of another Psychoville favourite, the terrifying hookhanded children’s entertainer Mr Jelly (Shearsmith, again), also managed the impossible, by nigh-on stealing the show with his attempt at making balloon animals.
“What’s his favourite animal?” he asked the mum of the baby whose first birthday he’d been hired to help celebrate.
“Monkey,” came the reply. “Nah, f*** that. You can have sausage dog, snake or giraffe.”
A fantastic instalment of a fantastic programme that harked back to another, albeit underappreciated, classic.
No.9? Cloud nine, more like.
■ AFTER a gruelling six weeks – it felt A LOT longer – real life crime drama
came to a close. Gripping, for the most part, but it could have easily been told in four parts. Cutting every scene involving Stephen Graham’s awful Welsh accent would have shaved off a good hour, for starters.
Farm (ITV) White House