COMEDY PARTNERS
Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith reveal the secrets of their 30-year partnership
DESPITE THE BUCKETFUL of Baftas, Royal Television Society Awards and the odd Rose d’Or that their close partnership has brought them, Inside No 9 creators Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith are very different people. Pemberton, from Blackburn, is an ebullient Lancastrian who brims with self-conf idence. Fascinated by the nuts and bolts of what the two men do, he interrogates plots until they are pitch-perfect. Shearsmith, from Hull, is also hugely talented but a textbook example of the taciturn, even slightly resentful, Yorkshireman.
When Shearsmith went to drama school in the late 1980s, he thought Pemberton and his pal Mark Gatiss didn’t have the time of day for him. “It was hard for me,” says 54-year old Shearsmith, remembering his arrival at Bretton Hall in Yorkshire. “They were already minor celebrities in the year above me and we didn’t really mix. We were the smaller children trying to talk to the grown-ups.”
In reality, Pemberton, 56, recalls being fascinated by the new arrival with a strange face. Eventually they bonded over a shared love of British horror films, the Two Ronnies, Victoria Wood, Alan Bennett and Play for Today. From this rich stew Shearsmith and Pemberton went on to create The League of Gentlemen, Psychoville and then Inside No 9.
The two men, who shared a London flat after college, have now been working cheek by jowl for more than 30 years – but the difference in their characters still shows. It was there to see in the way they cast themselves in the first episode of this final series. In Boo to a Goose, Pemberton was dragged-up in wig and fake boobs, apparently determined to steal every scene. Shearsmith, meanwhile, quietly delivered a weedy suburban husband, intent on ingratiating himself with the forces of convention – no matter the cost to others. It is such philosophical pondering, alongside the grotesquery they love, that has made the show so distinctive.
Both have their own separate successes; Shearsmith recently appeared in Saltburn, and Pemberton put in a Herculean stint on Benidorm. But if British TV is to remain at its weirdest and best, then we really do need them to stick together. So will they team up again? “We’d like to give our brains a slight rest,” says Pemberton. “But we shall see.”
Steve on Reece
‘Mark Gatiss and I were in the same year at drama school. They used to put up a photograph of the following intake at the start of the year and Reece’s picture stood out immediately, as he was pulling this very pompous face. I think he was doing it ironically — I hope he was — but your eye went to him immediately. And his name, Reece Shearsmith! We thought he might be a character worth knowing, or a big bellend.
I don’t recall the exact moment we met but we shared
