Nine Of The Times:Inside No.9 S2.

"Laughter contorts the face and makes monkeys of men. Only the devil would turn such sport" - Mr Warren, 17c witchfinder. 

It took me a while to get round to it but when I finally did sit down and watch the second series of Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith's Inside No.9 (BBC2/iPlayer, originally screened way back in 2015) it didn't take me long to get through them.

I'd never seen a single one of these episodes before (I know!) and I'd definitely been missing out. They were all, without exception, excellent. I almost regretted my decision to write my review of the series in reverse order of how much I liked them because it's virtually impossible to say one is better than another.

Other than purely arbitrarily, how does one judge these things? The standard is so high. Whereas some are funnier than others, some are more chilling, and some may have a more wicked twist they're all, quite simply, brilliant. I felt chilled during each one and I laughed out loud at most of them. Sometimes it seems that my favourite episode is simply the one I've just finished watching.

But something has to come bottom of the list. So I'm choosing La Couchette. To give you an idea of how high the quality of these shows is I thought after watching it, the first of this batch of six, that it may well be a contender for first place!

Shearsmith plays a doctor, name of Maxwell, who is trying to get a good night's sleep on a sleeper train in France because he's got a big interview the next morning with the World Health Organisation. His attempts at sleep are constantly interrupted by a drunken German, Jorg (Pemberton), who farts, snores, and watches porn on his phone.

When Jorg finally quietens, they're joined in the booth with bickering couple Les (Mark Benton, you'll recognise him from Early Doors) and Kath (Julie Hesmondhalgh) and a lager swigging Aussie backpacker Shona (Jessica Gunning). Shona's picked up posh and insensitive Hugo (Jack Whitehall) and they're intent on telling each other traveller's tales, snogging, and maybe a bit more.

There's some amusing double entendres and even some amusing single entendres. Plus just some general gross out stuff. A man shitting in a shoe box and Shona's story of taking a photo of Mannekin Pis urinating in her mouth. But it's a very quiet passenger who manages to cause the biggest stir in the whole compartment. When his true identity is revealed it's both chilling and, for me, completely unexpected.

Although that's true for most episodes of Inside No.9. Nana's Party tells the story of a 79th birthday party that upwardly mobile and obsessively house proud (she has a "second best tablecloth" Angela (Claire Skinner) is hosting for her mum Maggie (Elsie Kelly). Sadly for Angela, most of her family - daughter Katie (Eve Gordon) aside - don't share Angela's sense of aspiration and decorum.

Angela's husband Jim (Pemberton) is planning to prank his brother-in-law Pat (Shearsmith) in revenge for suffering years of hoaxes and dreadfully corny jokes at his expense. Pat's wife, Angela's sister, Carol (Lorraine Ashbourne) likes a drink - even decanting booze from a bottle of suntan lotion while in the toilet - though judging by the standard of Pat's jokes you can hardly blame her.

As Angela hides inside a cake, all manner of dark family secrets emerge and you can only guess at what ultimately will prevail. Perhaps the most telling character in the whole piece is Katie. A young girl who just wants to get on with her homework and not be dragged in to this mad adult world.

Seance Time begins with Tina (Sophie McShera) attending a seance. There she meets with Madam Talbot (Alison Steadman) and her assistant Hives (Shearsmith) in a creepy room full of dolls, rocking horses, tambourines, gramophones, and candles. All, of course, is not as it seems.

I laughed out loud to a highly unlikely reference to Shoestring but it was the appearance of Dan Starkey as 'Blue Demon Dwarf' that really paid dividends in a comedy drama that touched on questions of how we, as humans, treat and respect each other. Not always as well as we should but will we ever pay for that?

To watch The Trial Of Elizabeth Gadge, it is suggested that justice is not always done - and certainly wasn't in the time of the witch trials. Gadge (Ruth Sheen) lives in the 17th century and in the village of Little Happens. She's been accused of witchcraft and the village's magistrate Sir Andrew Pike (the veteran Shakespearean actor David Warner clearly having a ball) has summoned two famous witchfinders, Warren and Clarke!, to preside over the supposed evidence.

You can probably guess who play the morally dubious witchfinders! If Gadge is found guilty she'll be burned at the stake but it must have been a big ask for Sheen not to burst out laughing as the dialogue is so richly humorous. This is the sort of thing Pemberton and Shearsmith seem to love - and excel at.

Folk horror cosplay with imps, fiends, crones, hogs, talking mice, and people flying around on shovels. As Gadge is accused of drinking "cold milk from the devil's tit", the story develops in an unexpected direction and though the twist is there - and it's yet another good one - The Trial Of Elizabeth Gadge is played more for laughs, and lots of them, than for darkness.

Cold Comfort doesn't let up when it comes to showing us the darkness that lives in the human soul, though. It's Andy's (Pemberton) first day working on a crisis phoneline and George (Shearsmith), his boss, is showing him the ropes. His colleagues Liz (Jane Horrocks) and Joanna (Nikki Amuka-Bird) don't get on - they have very different approaches to the job - but Andy's determined to do things his way.

It doesn't go as planned (no shit!). Between calls selling PPI, people wanking down the phone, and a lady who is devastated that her cat, Picasso, has died, Andy receives a call from a suicidal teenage girl who, bizarrely, asks him to sing for her. Shine by Take That. She says her favourite song is American Pie but she probably hasn't got time for that as she's just taken an overdose.

Filmed as if on CCTV, and with an appearance from the excellent character actor Tony Way, it is chillingly brilliant and dark in the very best way imaginable. But still not as dark as my series winner. The 12 Days of Christine sends chills down my back just thinking about it.

Christine (Sheridan Smith) and Adam (Tom Riley) meet at a New Year's Eve fancy dress party. She's dressed as a witch and him as a fireman. They get it on and a relationship begins but we only get to see that relationship via Christine's seemingly unreliable memory. As we do other major moments in her life:- birthday parties, weddings, arguments, bringing up kids.

But Christine's memory of her life, or even her actual life, is all out of sequence. People (her flatmate Fung (Stacy Liu), her mother Marion (Michele Dotrice - oooh Betty!), and even Adam) come and go and every now and then something weird and inexplicable seems to happen to her that freaks her, and us, out. When the eggs start smashing against the wall when she's in her flat alone it's bloody scary.

And why do we keep hearing Andrea Bocelli's 'Con te partito'? It could almost be an episode of Black Mirror - and that's very high praise indeed. You have a sense that this drama of what appears to be ordinary family lives is heading, irretrievably, to a very dark place.

Which it is. But also a sad and bone chillingly cold place. The 12 Days Of Christine is something of a minor masterpiece but then, in all seriousness, the whole of the second series of Inside No.9 is. Surely the next few series can't maintain this standard?