Inside No 9: Empty Orchestra - creepy karaoke, white rap and Elaine Paige - review

Anyone who has taken part in a works’ karaoke outing knows that it’s an arena for bad singing, annoyingly good singing and professional tensions to surface unprofessionally. The latest episode of Inside No 9, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s terrifically clever portmanteau series, exploited this to full effect to provide another 30-minute oddity that was bursting with ideas and left you with a feeling of deep unsettlement, like reading an MR James story and then remembering the denouement in your dreams and waking up in a cold sweat.

Greg (Reece Shearsmith) was engaged to bubbly colleague Fran (Miranda’s Sarah Hadland) but having an affair with bitchy Connie (Tamzin Outhwaite). When we first saw him, Greg (dressed in a fat sumo suit) was singing The Human League’s Don’t You Want Me to Connie (dolled up as Amy Winehouse), while Fran (channeling a schoolgirl Britney Spears) remained painfully oblivious. But this wasn’t just a suburban love triangle. To make matters worse, rumours of redundancies abounded and Greg found a list drawn up by boss, Roger (Steve Pemberton), which he assumed denoted potential victims.

This episode, set completely within the claustrophobic confines of a karaoke booth illustrated how good Pemberton and Shearsmith are at creating maximum tension on a minimal budget (and proof, commissioners take note, that stand-alone stories work without breaking the bank). We were treated (or subjected?) to karaoke classics from beginning to end - as Rainbow, Elaine Paige, Barbara Dickson and Wham punctuated the tensions among the six staff members. Javone Prince “white rapping” to Boy George was a highlight. 

The performances were painted with the broadest of brush strokes, but that suited the super-annuated, hypercharged nature of the plot and the faintly camp dialogue - “She was all over him like clingfilm at a buffet”. Pemberton was particularly good as forlorn Brummie Roger, announcing his imminent divorce to the group and his decision to move to Florida to be near his brother. By the end, he was eyeing up the much younger head of a hen do and wondering if she liked Whitesnake.

However, after the near brilliance of last week’s episode, The Riddle of the Sphinx, which mixed cryptic-crossword solving with cannibalism, Empty Orchestra felt slightly flat. The twist, that deaf colleague Janet could lip-read and was thus able to expose Greg and Connie’s affair felt a little obvious, even if Emily Howlett’s performance as Janet carefully built up the tension. The other problem was that amid the karaoke din, it was hard to get a proper handle on the characters or, indeed, really care about their fates.

Yet, the fact remains that Inside No 9 is more inventive and inspiring than anything currently on TV. It doesn’t try to snare any particular demographic; each episode is dazzlingly different from the last; and the plotting is always woven with intense intricacy. And even if Empty Orchestra failed to reach the highs of the best of the series, any story that ends with someone dressed as Boy George snogging someone dressed as Michael Jackson can’t be all bad.