Inside No 9: Hull-born Reece Shearsmith on working with Sherlock’s Amanda Abbington, EastEnders’ Anita Dobson, People Just Do Nothing’s Asim Chaudhry and Gavin & Stacey’s Mathew Horne for return of BBC comedy

They are perhaps best known for being members of The League of Gentlemen alongside Mark Gatiss and Jeremy Dyson, who they met at Bretton Hall College, near Wakefield.

The League of Gentlemen sitcom originally ran in the late 1990s and early 2000s – they were also involved in the making of a film version in 2005 and in 2018 brought the programme back as a live arena and theatre show – and the pair went on to create Psychoville.

But the continued success of Inside No. 9 for almost a decade is testament to their imagination and wit.

It has achieved a stellar cast list in every one of its previous series, and its eighth instalment, which is about to start on BBC Two, is no exception.

Sherlock’s Amanda Abbington, EastEnders’ Anita Dobson, People Just Do Nothing’s Asim Chaudhry, Gavin & Stacey’s Mathew Horne and many more all appear in the hilarious and horrifying new series alongside Shearsmith and Pemberton themselves.

This series takes viewers to such locations as the top deck of a London bus and a remote lakeside cabin and all, of course, linked by the number 9.

What more can people expect from this outing?

Shearsmith says: “Once again, series eight is six very different stories. Some silly, some frightening and some, this time around, quite gory, which is something that we haven’t done before.

“As always, lots of surprises, twists and turns.”

Now that theyre eight series in, how do they find coming up with new ideas, locations and themes?

“Locations are the easy bit to come up with,” says Shearsmith, who received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Hull in 2013.

“The nine on something is the easiest part, but the story and what happens, that’s everything. To come up with something now that we feel like we haven’t done before – that’s getting harder.

“We’ve now got to be mindful that we’re not repeating ourselves or doing the same story but not as good as (a) past one we’ve done. It gets harder, but that’s the challenge.”

What’s it been like working with this series’ guest stars?

“It was really nice to get very quick and very enthusiastic yeses from Anita Dobson and Phil Daniels when they said yes to Mother’s Ruin, because they’re perfect for the parts. We never write the parts with anyone in mind, but when we finally came to casting it, and to get back ‘yes, we’d love to do it’, it was great. It felt really pleasing to think they were going to be bringing life to those characters and they did, so that was really thrilling.

“We’ve got some great people again this year. It was great to work with Amanda Abbington again, playing my wife now on film and on the stage, because we were doing a play together at the same time,” he adds, referring to their roles in the play The Unfriend, written by Steven Moffat and directed by his old friend Mark Gatiss, who is from Sedgefield.

"Asim Chaudhry was brilliant in his episode. Everyone was really brilliant, and they all brought something to it.

“No-one has ever come in and we’ve thought ‘oh, that’s not how we imagined’ or if they have done that, they’ve made more of what we’ve given them, and that’s always great, better than what we imagined.”

Shearsmith has previously said he brought up on a “diet” of comics like Victoria Wood, Alan Bennett and the Play For Today, admiring performers such as Leonard Rossiter and Ronnie Barker.

Does he have a favourite character from this series of his own show?

“I quite liked the episode that’s called Paraskevidekatriaphobia. It’s about a man that’s terrified of Friday the 13th, which is a real phobia, and he spends the day of Friday 13th just trying to not have anything happen to him – and as you can imagine, some things do.

“The escalation of that, and the man’s terrible day as things get worse and worse, was a fun part to play. So the part of Gareth in that episode I enjoyed doing, it was quite slapstick and I like doing physical comedy.”

The show won a BAFTA for best scripted comedy in 2021, while Shearsmith was nominated in the male performance in a comedy category (won by Pemberton, from Blackburn, in 2019). He thinks people will be excited to see what happens in this series and says that fans, too, have had their own input.

“The idea of doing the bus episode was almost like a fan joke that we should do.

"People always give us ideas for number nines and the most obvious one you can probably think of is doing a number nine bus. We’d had it a lot, and thought we’d go ahead with it – that’ll be a fun one for people to get their head around when they finally see it.

“The gore of Mother’s Ruin too, and there are some that are more thoughtful and a bit more reflective, and people like those ones. People loved Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room and The 12 Days of Christine, they are very moving ones. I think we’ve got some in this mix that have got that sort of feel as well. There might be sleeper hits that we can’t quite work out yet.”

Inside No. 9 returns to BBC Two on Thursday, April 27 at 10pm, and people can also view it on iPlayer.