Sheridan Smith

Inside No. 9 - The 12 Days of Christine review

The sheer enjoyment of this instalment was found in the filmmaking tricks used to send viewers tumbling through Christine's chaotic life-story; and the central performance of Sheridan Smith, who was wonderful throughout. One of the show's best, undoubtedly.

Comedy, they say, is subjective. I compared the first story of the new series of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's Inside No. 9 with Chaucer's Prologue, thereby offending at least one reader who thought its "puerile humour" as "flatulent as its one-dimensional figures". If he hated last night's play, The 12 Days of Christine, it will be for different reasons. Humour did not really come into this dark tale, and if Pemberton played one of his usual sympathetic gay men, Sheridan Smith gave tragic depth to its central character, Christine.

It began with the camera focusing on a Christmas bauble, dully reflecting the intermittent flashes of the lights on its tree. Later, a flickering fluorescent light would extend the clue: this was a play, delivered in 12 fragments spaced over a decade, about a human memory's spasmodic grasp. The Saturnalian confusions of the first scene parodied what we would, by the end, realise was Christine's friable mental conditional.

It is New Year's Eve and she, dressed as a nun, is back from a party having copped off with a pretend fireman. The next scene, set on Valentine's Day, by which time she and Adam are an item, reveals she is a shoe-fitter, flat-sharing with an unsympathetic science student studying, as it happens, "measurable magnitudes".

As she and Adam's relationship progresses through marriage, sleepless parenthood, the death of her father and separation, Christine becomes half-convinced that she is being haunted by her goofy first boyfriend who, she has forgotten, died at the age of 16. Christine has, says her mother, a memory like a sieve. At this stage, the viewer will be more interested in the thought that Christine has deliberately blocked the lad out and that he has come back into her life seeking revenge. A crash in which Christine is injured appears later to have been caused by him walking in front of her car.

Shearsmith and Pemberton have long been interested in ghost stories, finding an affinity between their breaches of realism and comedy's transgressions. What is remarkable is they have used this trope and a troupe of comedy actors - notably the excellent Michele Dotrice, who plays Christine's mum - to make a serious statement about the supernatural. A haunting, it is strongly suggested, is a symptom of mental illness, in this caser early-onset dementia. Life for Christine has become a nightmare version of her favourite game: blind man's bluff.

The final scene is set again at Christmas, this time around a family table, in which all appears to have been restored. Adam and Christine are back together. Her Alzheimic father, who had died, is alive once more. She is presented with a book of photos, her life in pictures. She feels it "flashing by" - and with sudden, awful clarity, Christine works out what has happened. So do we. Her son returns from a nativity play dressed as an angel. Her favourite CD, Con te Partiro, strikes up, sung by an artist known for his physical rather than mental blindness.

This was a masterpiece, whether or not my interpretation is right (it could have been one long dying dream). It was shown on Maundy Thursday, presumably, only because, despite its Yule-like bookends, we would not have had the stomach for it at Christmas.

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are the strange, slightly upsetting gift that keeps on giving. In this second series, they reprise their talent for macabre tales united only by their being well-written, tightly plotted and taking place inside a door with a No 9 on it. Tonight's episode stars Sheridan Smith as Christine, a sales clerk whose life we observe in impressionistic blasts. Can you unpick her story before she herself says: "Oh, I know what this is ..."? And yes, 70s people, that is Michele Dotrice!

Radio Times review

If you're wondering why we're not billing this as a comedy, that's because there's almost nothing funny in the latest tale. Instead, it's an utterly superb piece of drama, imbued with an increasing sense of dread - with the almost unguessable sting in the tail that this series delivers so well.

Little should be said about the plot other than that The 12 Days of Christine is set in flat No 9 of a tower block and it begins with a woman dressed as a nun and a man in fireman gear tumbling onto a settee after copping off at a fancy dress party. Hunky Tom Riley is Adam and Sheridan Smith gives another multi-faceted, stunning performance as the troubled Christine. Sitcom legend Michele Dotrice plays her mum.

Writers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith pop up in minor but telling roles. And Pemberton deploys Con te partiro on the soundtrack, as he once did in Benidorm - but with devastating effect.

One of the best pieces of television for years

Sheridan Smith stars in one of the best pieces of television for years.

Sheridan Smith stars in a story that sees Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith departing radically from their usual claustrophobic black comedy; there is little to laugh at in The 12 Days Of Christine, a study of time and memory that resembles a short enigmatic arthouse film. In a dozen scenes coinciding with public or personal red-letter days, Smith plays a woman passing through marriage, motherhood, divorce and bereavement, with Paul Copley, Michele Dotrice, Tom Riley and the writers in supporting roles.

Alarming things keep happening to Christine, making her increasingly troubled and presenting the viewer with a series of puzzles. Why, for example, does the heroine's flatmate mention mathematical number theory? Why are we subjected to Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman warbling Time To Say Goodbye? Are these significant clues, or just red herrings?

Even by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's usual high standards, this week's instalment of Inside No. 9 is exceptional. Set in a small flat, The 12 Days Of Christine follows the key moments in the life of a young woman, played by Sheridan Smith. But, as always, everything is not quite as it seems. Powerful, poignant and inventive, it's a masterclass in concise storytelling.

Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are something else. In the first series of Inside No. 9 last year, there was an episode involving a couple of masked idiots trying to steal a painting from a modernist home in which scarcely a word was spoken, and yet it was one of the funniest, cleverest, most imaginative and original programmes shown on television in the last 15 years. They've done it again.

This magnificent episode [The 12 Days of Christine] is not entirely perfect - there's a lot of spooky creeping around at night with lights flickering on and off that suggests the pair may have spent more time with The League Of Gentlemen and Psychoville than is strictly healthy. However, if you treat the presence of the otherworldly as a means to an end, the episode is a distillation of accurate observation that says more about the hope and messiness and disappointment of life in half an hour than most dramas say over an entire series.

It describes the trajectory of one woman's life - superbly performed, as always, by Sheridan Smith - from her student days to marriage, children and beyond. At the very end, looking back with sadness and regret, she says: "I didn't think it would turn out like this." There is something infinitely poignant about seeing two different versions of events and recognising the chasm between what might have been and what was.

Those masters of the dark arts, the former League Of Gentlemen co-stars Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, return with a second instalment of their deliciously macabre shorts, the first series of which won best comedy performance at the Royal Television Society awards last week.
Like a Tales Of The Unexpected for the 21st century, each perfectly formed 30 minutes offers a masterclass in storytelling: witty, imaginative, inventive and suspenseful - with a clever twist at the end for good measure.
The six tales are linked by the number nine and in the opening episode, La Couchette, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Mark Benton, Jessica Gunning and Jack Whitehall join Pemberton and Shearsmith on board the sleeper train from Paris to Bourg-Saint-Maurice. They're a motley collection trying to get a quiet night's sleep as the train makes its way across France, but as the sleeping compartment fills up, the chances of that begin to look highly unlikely...
The setting for future episodes include a séance in the grand Victorian villa, a modern-day family get-together, a 17th-century village witch trial and a volunteer call centre, with Alison Steadman, Claire Skinner, Jane Horrocks, Paul Kaye and Tom Riley among the cast. Special mention must go to Sheridan Smith, however, for her performance in next week's offering, The 12 Days Of Christine, a powerful, moving story of one woman's rocky journey through life. It is an absolute gem, one of the best things I have seen on television this year.

Over on Sky Arts 1, some light relief from Psychobitches, one of the best new comedies on TV last year, though given its tiny home, few people actually got to see it. It's a sketch show set in a therapist's office, in which famous (dead) women from history tell psychiatrist Rebecca Front their troubles. The first series was a knockout - Julia Davis played a wailing hybrid of Pam Ayres and Sylvia Plath; the Brontë sisters were foul-mouthed, filthy puppets obsessed with sex, and Sharon Horgan played a campy Eva Peron, who clung on to her bottles of "boobles". It was silly, and odd, and very funny.

This second series is almost as good, though it feels more like a traditional sketch show and is slightly patchier, perhaps due to the sheer number of writers (I counted 12 on the credits for the first episode of this double bill, and seven on the second). In the best sketch, Kathy Burke and Reece Shearsmith play the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret as crude and grotesque, glugging down booze as Burke repeatedly rejects her on-screen offspring with delicious cruelty. Morgana Robinson joins the cast to play a sloppy Anna Nicole Smith - hers is a masterclass in physical comedy - and there's a musical skit featuring Unity, Decca and Nancy Mitford, as imagined by Horgan, Samantha Spiro and Sophie Ellis Bexter. In a sketch the Mail has already called "hideous", Michelle Gomez has gone from Doctor Who's Missy to an even more terrifying villain, playing Thatcher as a Hannibal Lecter-style monster, incapable of love. It's at its finest when it's upsetting the establishment, and it relishes its naughtiness.

The second episode was less sharp. Perhaps, given its hyperactive pace, it works better in single doses. But I loved Horgan as Carmen Miranda - "Of course I'm on fucking drugs" - and Sheridan Smith as a mute Sleeping Beauty, whose endless sleep has an ulterior motive. And anything that gets Kathy Burke back on our screens, even for a few minutes, is well worth our attention.