Construction time again #5:Theaster Gates and the Serpentine Pavilion.

It's almost like some kind of monolith. Or at least a group of monoliths that have been brought together to create a circle. It stands on the surprisingly green grass, elsewhere it's still parched and yellow following the heatwave, of Kensington Gardens and it looks very impressive when you first see it.

I try to make a point of always going to see the annual Serpentine Pavilion. I've been going for well over a decade and I even wrote about my visits in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. The last two years, well, you may have heard. There's been stuff on. People haven't been getting out so much.

This year's pavilion has been designed by the Chicago born Theaster Gates and I learn, from the Serpentine's website, that it "references the bottle kilns of Stoke-on-Trent, the beehive kilns of the Western United States, San Pietro and the Roman tempiettos, and traditional African structures such as the Musgum mud huts of Cameroon and the Kasubi Tombs of Kampala, Uganda".

I'll be completely upfront and admit that I'm none too familiar with any of that vernacular sounding architectural stuff. Gates has given the building the impressively grand name of the Black Chapel and he sees it as a space for "contemplation and convening". Both, of course, would be possible. Convening easily - though this was a solo mission for me - but contemplation a little less so.

Which is a shame. But it's the commercial imperatives that stymie attempts at making the Black Chapel a place of deep peace. Though the serving counter is well hidden, you can buy almond croissants (£3.30), popcorn (£2), sandwiches, salads, wraps, and ice creams from within the pavilion and though I find it quite pleasurable to contemplate with the aid of snacks I'm not entirely sure that's the type of contemplation that such an impressive building should encourage.

I can't imagine eating a bag of Wotsits in Houston's Rothko Chapel and that, to me, is the kind of building that Gates is aspiring to here. The website, again, says as much. Although it also mentions Hungarian round churches and the "voodoo circles and roda de capoeira witnessed in the sacred practices of the African diaspora".

It's a lot to fit into one, let's face it, fairly simple, yet impressive, structure. As you enter the Black Chapel there is a bell laying outside one of the two openings. It's been salvaged from the former St Laurence church in Chicago's South Side and Gates is clearly trying to make us think about the closing down of public spaces across the planet.

But, again, how would you know that? The bell looks good and is apparently even rung to signify when the Serpentine are hosting performances. It would have been nice to attend during one of those performances, to see the Black Chapel in action as it were. Instead I simply took a seat to the side, feeling as if I was on some kind of Rotor funfair ride, gazed at the sky through the hole in the roof, and left by the opposite entrance to the one I came in through. It was good to be back in the Serpentine Pavilion and the Black Chapel is a gorgeous looking building. It would probably have been even better had I (a) gone with a friend and (b) attended during an 'activation'.

Fog On The Nine:Inside No.9 S4.

Four series down, three to go. Which makes it sound like work - and it is very much not like work. It's pleasure. Sometimes a funny pleasure, sometimes a chilling pleasure - but always a pleasure. Series four of Inside No.9 (BBC2/iPlayer) initially went out in January and February 2018 (with a live Hallowe'en special later that year - in October strangely enough) and it saw Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith both keeping the quality as high as ever as well as diversifying into more experimental modes of short film making.

So here's my list, as ever in reverse order, of all seven episodes from least impressive to most impressive. It's not a definitive list. It's a personal, and objective, one and you can happily argue among yourselves about accurate it is. 

Once Removed is a story told backwards and it suffers, just a little bit, from being a little too clever for its own good. The narrative device was difficult to follow and that's a pity because there's some good ideas here. We begin with removal man Spike (Nick Moran, whom I saw in the Trinity Arms in Brixton on Friday evening) arriving at the house of May (Monica Dolan) to help her move.

Soon we're introduced to people who appear to be her friends and family but we're never quite sure who exactly Charles (Rufus Jones), Natasha (Emilia Fox), and Percy (David Calder) actually are or where their motivation lies. I enjoyed all the references to Richard Stilgoe, Hot Gossip, erectile dysfunction, Julie Covington, and Tim Rice, I was amused by a debate as to how long a "yonk is", and I wasn't offended by all the dead bodies that kept appearing but I was a little befuddled by this one and it left me cold rather than chilled.

The Hallowe'en special, Dead Line, was also confusing. But it was clearly meant to be. The story begins with Arthur (Pemberton) returning home with a mobile phone he's found in a graveyard. Soon he begins to receive unusual calls and soon the sound cuts out and a BBC2 continuity announcer tells the audience there's something wrong and instead they'll be screening A Quiet Night In. An episode from Inside No.9 series one!

It's quite bizarre but it gets weirder still. There's an appearance from Stephanie Cole and there's scenes and happenings which appear lifted from Most Haunted, The One Show, and Coronation Street - as well as others showing Shearsmith and Pemberton, ostensibly playing themselves, sat around in the dressing room grumbling and looking at Twitter.

I think what they were trying to do here was a riff on the infamous Ghostwatch and although Dead Line is pretty chilling in places it seems a modern television audience are simply too wised up to be taken in hook, link, and sinker by such trickery. Though, having said that I did fast forward at one point as I thought my connection was faulty.

And The Winner Is made for a far more traditional episode. Giles (Pemberton) is tasked with leading a jury through a list of potential winners of a best television actress award. The jury consists of successful TV producer Gordon (Noel Clarke), old luvvy actor Rupert (Kenneth Cranham), critic June (Fenella Woolgar), fomerly successful, but now down on his luck and eager to ingratiate himself with Gordon, writer Clive (Shearsmith), American star slumming it in theatre Paula (Zoe Wanamaker), and competition winner Jackie (Phoebe Sparrow) who's been brought in to represent audiences at home.

As they sit round a big table and winnow their way through the list of nominees, we witness the conversation drift into personal enmities, snobbery, racism, sexism, diversity, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and hand jobs in cars outside pubs in the 1970s. It gets pretty heated and if the final twist is not the most macabre, or eerie, in this show's repertoire it's still pretty neatly done.

Zanzibar is another episode that tries something different. The whole episode is delivered in iambic pentameter. Which, when you get used to it, is nowhere near as off-putting as it may sound. Zanzibar's the name of a hotel and on the ninth floor a motley assortment of guests are staying whose fates, it will transpire, will be dependent both on each other and some frankly unlikely coincidences.

Prince Rico (Rory Kinnear) is a rich businessman who wishes to procure a lady for 'water sports', Vince (Kevin Eldon) is a stage hypnotist, Marcia Warren is Alice, a confused old lady and Pemberton plays her son. Hattie Morahan plays sexually frustrated Amber, Tanya Franks is call girl Tracey, and Bill Patterson plays the depressed Mr Green.

The bellboy Fred (Jaygann Aneh) and Helen Marks is his girlfriend, the waitress Colette. Between the lot of them, they manage to go from changing rooms, apple tarts, and spaghetti bolognaise to marriage proposals, prostitution, and mistaken identity. Then even further on to potential murder and suicide. Despite the sometimes dark subject matter, there are a couple of genuine LOLs and the whole things is a rather ludicrous, but thoroughly enjoyable, romp.

Which is probably not how you'd describe Tempting Fate. Council works Keith (Pemberton), Nick (Shearsmith), and Maz (Weruche Opia) have been assigned the task of clearing out the flat of a dead hoarder. It's not a clean flat, there's even a dead rat in the kitchen, but what they find in his safe seems to be of even more concern.

There's an old VHS video cassette and some kind of bronze ornamental hare. To say any more would be to move in to spoiler territory but suffice to say things get pretty spooky and some scenes are very tense. There's even a brief, but vital, cameo from Nigel Planer.

To Have And To Hold is equally dark. Wedding photographer Adrian (Pemberton) and his wife Harriet (Nicola Walker) are bored of their marriage. She wants things to improve but he only seems interested in doing jigsaw puzzles and eating Pot Noodles. He also spends a lot of time in his dark room. His very dark room.

Quite often he wanders round the house in his boxer shorts. There's some very funny stuff in this one (a dream about John Prescott and some creme eggs, a story about being sucked off in a Wolverhampton chain hotel) but when it goes from comedy to horror it is surprisingly effective. There's an element of Bong Joon-ho's Parasite about it but as that film came out in 2019 it seems Pemberton and Shearsmith got there first.

Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room, now there's a title, isn't as dark as To Have And To Hold (or Tempting Fate) but it's still very chilling and even surprisingly moving. Surprising given the subject matter anyway. Minor 1980s comedians Cheese (Shearsmith) and Crackers (Pemberton) have reunited to do one last show and their act is horrifically dated.

It seems unlikely it was ever funny in the first place. It's been three decades since they split and the reasons they did won't become clear until well into the episode. At first we see the spiky, and now business like, Cheese (or Thomas) becoming frustrated with his former partner as he pours whiskey into his tea, appears to be stuck in the past, and is possibly living on the street.

And to be in denial of all these things too. Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room is rich, even by Inside No.9's standards, in references from the era of my youth. There's The Grumbleweeds, Blankety Blank, Ted Bovis, Bobby Knutt, Lorraine Chase, Kenny Everett, Joe Pasquale, Sid Little, Jeanette Krankie, Mr Peevly from The Hair Bear Bunch, Mary, Mungo, and Midge. Even The UK Subs and Kajagoogoo get a look in. Though I'd have chosen Jimmy The Hoover over Kajagoogoo.

I reckon that would have worked better. It's the only thing I'll knock about Bernie Clifton's Dressing Room because it wasn't until right at the very end that I realised what had happened. Even writing about it now, I've got a chill going up my back. With Inside No.9 that's something that happens in almost every episode. I'm just glad I'm finally catching up with this work of genius.

Fleapit revisited:What Ever Happened To Baby Jane.

There are huge gaps in my film knowledge. There are many influential and important films that, despite knowing of their place in the canon, I have simply never watched. One of those films is Robert Aldrich's 1962 'gothic horror' What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? Based on a novel by Henry Farrell, it was recently shown on BBC2 and is still available, if you're quick, on the iPlayer.

I went in - and I'm glad I did. The story tells of sisters 'Baby' Jane (Bette Davis) and Blanche Hudson (Joan Crawford). Now in their dotage, the former Hollywood stars are living - uneasily - together in what we're supposed to believe is a decrepit and decaying Hollywood mansion. Even though it looks rather magnificent to me.

That's set in what was then the present day - the early sixties - but we begin right back in 1917 with the young Baby Jane (Julie Allred) a huge child star who commands massive audiences with her twee song 'I've Written A Letter To Daddy'. She's known as The Diminutive Dancing Duse From Duluth and, in the auditorium after her shows, frankly creepy life size Baby Jane dolls are presented to audience members.

But young Jane is prone to a tantrum - especially if she can't get ice cream - and her father Ray (Dave Willock) indulges her. Both Jane and Ray are utterly merciless in their cruel and neglectful treatment of Jane's older sister Blanche (played, as a child, by Gina Gillespie) but as Jane's style of acting falls out of favour and her star starts to wane it is Blanche who becomes an even bigger star.

One of the biggest in the whole of Tinsel Town we learn. Jane descends into alcoholism, but honouring a pledge she had made to her mother Cora (Anne Barton) many years ago, Blanche does her best to keep Jane in work. She even has it written into her contract that for every film she appears in, Jane must be given a movie too.

But, in 1935, a mysterious car crash brings a premature end to Blanche's career. She is paralysed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair and when we meet the sisters again in 1962 that is how she remains. Having not called in John Stannah to have a stairlift fitted, Blanche, like the caged bird she keeps in her room, is essentially a prisoner.

The bird escapes (or seems to) but will Blanche? Not if Jane can help it. Though Blanche's earnings pay for the roof over their head, Jane is never once seen to be grateful. She is insanely jealous about Blanche's success and distraught and angry that her own career never continued into adult life.

Jane drinks, she belittles Blanche, slags her (and her films) off, and she opens Blanche's fan mail, reads it, and throws it in the bin without Blanche ever so much as seeing it. I would she goes quietly mental but when she goes mental it's often pretty loud. It becomes clear that no matter what she does, no matter how transgressive or plain wrong her behaviour is, it will always, always, be somebody else's fault. 

Probably Blanche's. Jane looks utterly ridiculous too. Their neighbour Mrs Bates (Anna Lee) and her daughter Liza (B. D. Merrill, curiously - Bette Davis' real life daughter) deliver flowers for Blanche but Jane is rude to them and the flowers seem to get no further than the downstairs sink. Housekeeper Elvira (Maidie Norman) is more switched on and senses what Jane is up to but will kind hearted Blanche believe her?

Is it easier to forgive a family member? Is it harder to believe their intentions are not as they should be? When Jane decides to revive her career she places an ad in a paper for a musician and arranger to work with and it's answered by slobbish mummy's boy Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono) who, for some reason, affects to be a camp Englishman in order to try and impress Jane.

Flagg and his mother Dehlia (Marjorie Bennett) are pretty much skint so it's easy to see what their motivation is although it's not immediately apparent what the addition of these characters really adds to the story. Perhaps that's because Crawford and Davis are such dominant screen presences nobody else, bar Norman as Elvira, really gets a look in.

People acted, in both senses of the word, very differently sixty years ago and sometimes What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? feels even older than it actually is. Not everything has dated that well but the general feeling, underpinned by Frank De Vol's jumpy score, is, as the film progresses, one of both tension and a terrible feeling that something really awful will surely happen.

Early on in the film, the camera has a tendency to cut away to blank faced dolls. It's jarring rather than creepy and the disgusting meals that Jane prepares for Blanche are just that. Disgusting but not scary. Jane's inane cackling is far worse. But the chills do come as the film progresses. I'd expected that but I'd not realised just how nasty the whole thing would get. What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? is a great illustration of how a toxic person can not just destroy themself but almost everyone around them. After watching this I'm not so sure having Bette Davis Eyes is such a great thing after all.

Every Rose Has Its Thorn:Red Rose.

"Roses are red, violets are blue. I'm here in the garden waiting for you"

Christ alive! Red Rose is scary. I was less than four minutes into the first of eight episodes when the first chill went up my back. It was far from the last. At one point I was so chilled to the bone I considered putting the radiator on. During a heatwave.

There's even some proper old school horror frights that will, quite likely, see you jump out of your seat. I'd forgotten how much fun that is. Red Rose (BBC3/iPlayer, created by Michael and Paul Clarkson) is set in and around Bolton and tells the story of a group of school leavers and what happens to them in what should be one of the most enjoyable times of anybody's life. That long, seemingly endless, post-exam summer.

You know the sort of things that happen. People sign each other's school shirts (and draw dicks on them too, of course), they smoke, they drink, they party (or they get upset because they've not been invited to any parties), they snog each other, and they argue about Jaffa Cakes. But, of course, things don't quite pan out like that for Rochelle, Wren, Ashley, Noah, Anthony, Taz, and Jaya.

Rochelle, or Roch (Isis Hainsworth) has lost her mum and lives with her dad Vinny (Samuel Anderson). They're struggling. Money's tight and Roch often has to look after her young twin sisters while Vinny's away working. Often they have no money for the electricity meter and we see Roch visit food banks.

When she downloads the Red Rose app to her phone, it looks - initially - as if it may be the answer to many of her problems. Red Rose asks Roch how she feels and if she needs help. It asks her to write her wishes on the mirror with lipstick and then, mysteriously, the meter is topped up. Red Rose's largesse doesn't end there. With a big party imminent, Roch has nothing to wear. Soon a sparkly dress and a pair of Jimmy Choo trainers appear.

Roch's best friend Wren (Amelia Clarkson) also lives with her mum, Rachel (Natalie Gavin), as well as working part time in her coffee and cake shop. Unbeknown to Rachel, Wren is meeting her estranged father Rick (Adam Nagaitis) in a local graveyard and she's also started a relationship with school friend Noah (Harry Redding).

Noah's best friend Anthony (Ellis Howard) is a kind lad but he's got a tough home life. His mum, Andrea (Jennifer Hennessy) drinks so heavily there's only about two hours a day, in the morning, when he can have a reasonable conversation with her. It's left to him, most of the time, to look after little brother Liam (Leo Ashton). On top of that, he's coming to terms with his own sexuality.

Ashley (Natalie Blair) is more confident. She gives as good as she gets when it comes to banter but has what appears to be, and is, a slightly weird obsession with Princess Diana. Most of the ribbing she gets comes from Taz (Ali Khan) who clearly dishes it out only because he likes her. Taz himself is on the receiving end of many a ribbing himself.

Jaya (Ashna Rabheru) is, to begin with, an outlier. She's not one of the Dickheads (as the gang's WhatsApp group has it) but she soon starts to win the others over with both her kindness and her extraordinary knowledge of coding and how the Internet works. Jaya is very smart and rarely joins the others in drinking and partying.

It falls, primarily, to Jaya to work out how Red Rose works because, soon enough, Red Rose has given up on the charitable acts and gone quite the other way. Soon it gets personal, it makes demands - unreasonable ones, it turns kind text messages from friends into nasty ones, and it posts inappropriate videos and comments to social media.

It doesn't stop there. It gets a lot worse. Weirder - and darker. The more the gang, and soon enough their parents too, learn about Red Rose the more dangerous it becomes. Red Rose, it seems, is not what anybody thought it was. Who is The Gardener? Who is Jacob (Charlie Hiscock)? And, not to put too fine a point on it, who is PIGFUCKER?

What are their intentions? What are their motivations? Why doesn't anyone just delete the fucking app? And why do a load of teenagers listen to music that came out about ten years before they were born? I noted tracks by Faithless, Ultra Nate, Robin S, N-Trance, Snap, Olive, Des'Ree, Tasmin Archer, and Oasis. Some even older. Laura Branigan, Boney M, 97 Lovers by Pulp, Boney M. Even Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. There must be some reason all these youngsters are listening to such old music!

The shellsuits worn by bullies Big Jenna (Hannah Griffiths) and Little Jenna (Silvie Furneaux), incidentally they're both about the same size, look dated too and I'm not totally convinced Aqua's Barbie Girl, even when delivered in a slowed down and hushed vocal style, really works as scary horror music but these are minor complaints because Red Rose is gripping from start to finish - and it's very difficult to predict what that finish will be.

Though there are nods to films and television programmes like Don't Look Now, The Vanishing, Frankenstein, The Ring, The Exorcist, Black Mirror, All Of Us Are Dead, and even Squid Game, Red Rose is resolutely its own thing. The psychological games of Guess Who the gang play ("do they look as if they own a cuckoo clock?", "do they think Covid is a hoax?") reflect the fact that often the gang are trying to second guess the intentions of even the people closest to them.

Red Rose refuses to only exist on the phones of Roch and Wren. It soon moves into dating apps, into the Internet of things, and into satnavs. The danger, of course, is will it move into the real world. I detect a sincerely felt dig at the social media entrepreneurs, especially Mark Zuckerberg, and even more I feel Red Rose delivers an important critique of the dark web and online cesspits like Reddit.

I was even, at one point, reminded of the horrific suicide epidemic of young people in Bridgend about fifteen years ago. Despite that, Red Rose does have its brighter moments. Roch's interactions with the twins, and Anthony's with Liam, are very sweet and how could anyone fail to snigger when presented with graffiti that reads "Ben drives a Micra and wears Crocs". The hills around Bolton look bloody lovely too.

With honourable mentions to Rod Hallett who plays Rachel's new love interest Simon and Amara Okereke as rich and popular party girl Becky Fox, the cast is outstanding throughout. They need to be because BBC3 don't have the budget of Netflix. This, however, can work in Red Rose's favour. Why can't the rain soaked streets of Bolton, or indeed the beautiful hills that surround it, be the setting for a dystopian and horrifying, yet thrilling, drama about what happens when we hand over too much of our lives to computers without really knowing how those computers work. Is the 'red rose' of the title the red rose of Lancashire or is it the red rose we lay on the grave of a loved one? 

Tied Up In Knots:Marriage.

A married couple, probably in their mid-fifties, are at an airport departure lounge. They're bickering, amicably, about chips and jacket potatoes (but not mash, we can all agree how great that is) and they're, not unreasonably, outraged about the price of ketchup sachets.

The conversation continues on the plane. For several long minutes. It's an inauspicious start to a programme but Marriage (BBC1/iPlayer, directed and written by Stefan Golaszewski) doesn't begin dull by default. It begins dull by design.

Or at least prosaic. Quotidian perhaps. We see Ian (Sean Bean) and Emma (Nicola Walker), the couple in question, lying on the couch watching telly together, visiting B&Q, eating crisps, folding clothes, scraping leftovers off dishes, talking about crumpets, making sandwiches, and, eating toast. There is A LOT of toast eating in Marriage.

As their mid-range motor sits outside on a suburban street surrounded by fallen autumnal leaves, we see Ian and Emma perfunctorily, but lovingly, kiss each other goodbye and we're in a world, familiar to many of us, where every social interaction begins with brewing a cup of tea. Often entire scenes take place in complete silence but that silence isn't necessarily Pinteresque. It's not covering up some deep rooted trauma. It's not a loaded silence.

It's just how life often is. If anything it reminds me of early episodes of Brookside. Ian and Emma live in a pleasant, not flash but nicer than my place, suburban house and they clearly adore and respect each other but, as with all lives, there are underlying tensions and as with so many men of his generation, Ian would, for the most part, rather not talk about them.

He'd prefer to complain about ketchup stains inside a lift at a company he's had an interview with. Ketchup crops up a lot. But so do the painful process of ageing and the hurt of loneliness. Ian and Emma have been together for twenty-seven years and Ian has recently lost his mum to cancer and found himself without work. He's the oldest applicant, by far, for most of the jobs he goes for. He won't admit he's lonely and he won't admit he's bored but he's clearly got too much time on his hands.

Just as Emma's career seems to be on an upward trajectory. Her boss Jamie (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) is a fairly typical obnoxious alpha male. He likes fast cars, expensive suits, unsuitably young women, and executive bugle. When Emma has to go away with him on a conference that involves them both staying in a hotel overnight, Ian is consumed by jealousy.

Even though, behind their backs, Jamie calls Emma a "boring old bitch" and Ian her "creepy fucking husband". He's entitled, arrogant, and he rudely speaks down to people who do what he considers less important jobs than him. Despite what he's said about Emma, you can never rule out that he may make a play for. If only in some kind of rotten power game.

Emma's got enough on her plate already. Her dad Gerry (James Bolam is now 87 and Only When I Laugh seems a long time ago) feels abandoned by her despite the fact she visits him regularly, makes his sandwiches for him, and pours his beer into a glass for him. It's not clear if he's suffering from dementia or if he's just a bit of a curmudgeon but clearly the relationship is challenging.

Gerry's face lights up though when he receives a visit from his granddaughter Jessica (Chantelle Alle). Jessica's a bright girl and a king girl. She's a singer-songwriter - and she's not a bad one either. Her presence would be enough to make anyone smile and certainly Ian and Emma are both incredibly proud of her.

Her boyfriend Adam (Jack Holden) instead, probably because of his own insecurities, chooses to put her down, belittle her, and gaslight her. You can't wait for her to leave him and when she meets friendly cafe worker Mark (Miles Barrow) she senses her chance to escape Adam and spend time with someone nicer. Mark is clearly enamoured of Jessica but are her feelings mutual?

As with so many things on Marriage, we never really get to find out. This is a slice of life drama and Golaszewski is unwilling to tie up any loose ends for narrative convenience. That doesn't make it a bad watch. Though it's so slow moving that my dad gave up after one episode ("that's an hour of my life I won't get back"), I found that persevering paid dividends.

Some of the office scenes have the silence, the noisy silence, of a Wetherspoons pub or an episode of The Office. But whereas The Office is punctuated by a cruel and cringe inducing humour, Marriage is marked out in tense episodes. We see Ian and Emma visit a grave and we realise that though home is where the love is, home can also be a place of absence and loss.

Marriage shows how terribly we struggle to articulate our feelings even, especially, to those we are closest to. How sometimes we prefer to tell those people the lies they want to hear rather than the truth we want to speak and how even in the most tragic of circumstances, even in death, we simply purse our lips and carry on working, smiling, brewing tea, and making small talk.

We can't bear to lose those closest to us and neither can we bear to hurt them. To hurt someone you love is to hurt yourself and we don't want that either. Though Marriage contains some of the most accurate takes on the generation gap I have seen on television, it is even more ruthlessly affecting when it concentrates solely on the gaps in the loving relationship between Ian and Emma.

I had some provisos about Marriage (I wasn't totally sure about the theme tune - Caroline Shaw's Partita For 8 Voices:No 1, Allemande - and some of the characters that Ian met during his search for work were a little crudely drawn) but overall I was very impressed by it.

Despite all the things left unsaid, all the questions unanswered, Marriage was a powerful, deep, and moving meditation on grief, ageing, jealousy, status, love, and companionship. So many dramas focus on people having affairs, people on dating apps, and people embarking on new relationships. It felt groundbreaking, and timely, to see one that looked at people who, despite it all, managed to stay together and managed to stay in love. Must be all that toast.

Red Red Nine:Inside No.9 S3.

The second series of Inside No.9 was so good it wasn't long at all until I was back for a proper look at the third one (screened on BBC2 and iPlayer back in December 2016 and February and March of 2017). It didn't, of course, disappoint so I present to you, as I have done with season one and two of the programme, my completely personal, and almost wholly arbitrary, list of each of the six episodes.

From the worst to the best. Not that there is a worst. But Private View was probably the one I was most underwhelmed by. The premise is that Maurice (Reece Shearsmith), Kenneth Williams (Steve Pemberton), partially sighted Patricia (Felicity Kendal) Big Brother contestant Carrie (Morgana Robinson) have all been invited to attend a private view of a new exhibition by the recently deceased artist Elliot Quinn (Johnny Flynn).

Overworked, and underpaid, waitress Bea (Montserrat Lombard) is tasked with providing drinks and reception to the often irascible and ungrateful guests. When the guests aren't being rude to Bea, they're being rude to each other as Private View riffs on the clash between high brow and low brow culture. Referenes to Ron Mueck rub up against ones to Homebase and Carrie's only knowledge of Picasso is that of the Citroen Picasso.

This immersive experience seems to have attracted an audience that is as exclusive as it is disparate. None of them, bar perhaps art critic Maurice, seem to know why they've been invited - and when some of them die it becomes ever more confusing as to what's happening. With references to clown's pockets and guest appearances by Fiona Shaw, Muriel Gray (commentating on the Turner Prize), and Peter Kay (whose cameo is very brief and, to some, probably very satisfying), Private View has all the hallmarks of a classic Inside No.9 and is a very enjoyable watch.

It's just that there are five better episodes in this series. Empty Orchestra's an enjoyable watch and not just for the music. We hear the likes of Come On Eileen, Don't You Want Me, Whigfield's Saturday Night, Wham Rap, Yazoo's Only You, Rainbow's Since You've Been Gone, I Know Him So Well, and, er, David Guetta and Sia's Titanium as a group of work colleagues meet in fancy dress to celebrate their boss Roger's (Pemberton) promotion.

They're all, except Roger himself, in fancy dress. Greg (Shearsmith) is either a sumo wrestler or one of the characters from New Order's True Faith video, his partner Fran (Sarah Hadland) has come as Britney Spears, bitchy Connie (Tamzin Outhwaite) has gone for the classic Amy Winehouse look, and deaf Janet (Emily Howett) is dolled up as Boy George.

Janet has the hots for Duane (Javone Prince) who turns up dressed as Michael Jackson and is soon operating a 'drugs bingo' which includes, alongside ecstasty, ketamine, and laxative, an orange Tic-Tac. Their karaoke evening, of course, does not go to plan and soon all the petty office politics, jealousies, prejudices, and crushes come out while Roger either sits in the corner working out who to sack or ties a tie round his head to sing a soft rock classic.

Janet's deafness is sympathetically handled and a crucial part of the plot and while Empty Orchestra (the literal meaning of kara-oke) is a fun and enjoyable watch it's not as macabre as you may expect from Shearsmith and Pemberton.

Which is not something you could level at The Riddle Of The Sphinx. Professor Nigel Squires (Pemberton) writes cryptic crosswords, under the alias of Sphinx, for Cambridge student magazine Varsity and Nina (Alexandra Roach) has broken into his office to ask for help solving them. Ostensibly she wants to impress her boyfriend Simon, an enthusiastic fan of the cryptics.

As with Private View, The Riddle Of The Sphinx, riffs on highbrow/lowbrow culture clashes. There's references to Pygmalion, Pictionary, Grindr, Hi-De-Hi, Chekhov, Sophocles, and the belief that all unusual meat seems to taste of chicken. When it is revealed that Nina works at Greggs she claims it's because she's "emotionally intelligent".

But that's what all the thickos say! The Riddle Of The Sphinx is an enjoyable enough clash of wits between Squires and Nina as it is but when Squires' colleague Tyler (Shearsmith) arrives things get very bizarre and the twists and turns were not ones that I saw coming though they were both imaginative and ghoulish. Extra points too for a none too subtle, and quite rare for these writers, political (and pro-NHS) point that's effortlessly squeezed in at the denouement.

The Bill is a simple but effective story in which three northerners, Malcolm (Pemberton seems to be inspired by Shearsmith's Geoff Tipps from The League Of Gentlemen), Archie (Shearsmith), and Kevin (Jason Watkins) are entertaining wealthy Londoner Craig (Philip Glenister). The evening is going well, old stories are being told, rude jokes are being made, until the long suffering and unnamed waitress (Ellie White) asks for the bill.  

Soon the four of them are fighting tooth and nail about who should pay the bill and their arguments and what seems to be their desire to show off their largesse spin out into personal insults, historical enmities, and so on and so on. Inevitably it all goes way too far but, of course, in the world of Inside No.9 nothing is quite as it seems.

When I wrote my first blog about Inside No.9 my friend Rob wrote to me to tell me how much he'd enjoyed watching the series with his young daughter. When I watched The Devil Of Christmas I hoped he hadn't watch that one with her. Screened as a Xmas special before the rest of the season it is, quite easily, the darkest episode of the entire series - and, for me, the second best.

It's December 1977 and an English family (Pemberton, his new wife Jessica Raine, his son George Bedford, and his mother Rula Lenska) have arrived in a chalet in the Austrian alps for a skiing holiday. Their guide Klaus (Shearsmith) frightens them with the story of Krampus and soon, in the chalet, strange things start to happen.

References to Worzel Gummidge and Berkhamsted root the whole thing in a kind of prosaic Englishness of the era but Klaus's enormous wonky pipe and deliciously hammy limp (Shearsmith really makes the most of this one) draw our attention to the fact that something, quite clearly, is not as it should be.

The Devil Of Christmas, with its intentionally bad acting - some of Pemberton's diction is reminiscent of Steven Toast - and 70s outfits, seems like an episode of The Hammer House Of Horror but it its, remarkably, perhaps even more grisly than one of them. When Krampus appears, or seems to appear, havoc is wreaked not just in the house but within the family and even behind the camera where a constant audio commentary by narrator Dennis Fulcher (Derek Jacobi, quite a scoop) takes us to places we really shouldn't go.

It was pipped to the series three title by the daft sounding Diddle Diddle Dumpling. Diddle Diddle Dumpling also has a pretty silly premise. When out jogging, David (Shearsmith) finds a solitary man's black leather slip-on shoe. He soon becomes obsessed with finding out who owns the shoe and can, it seems, not even go a minute without talking about it.

This, understandably, creates problems with his wife Louise (Keeley Hawes) and soon their nice house, with its lovely big garden, doesn't seem such a pleasant place to be. Vivaldi soundtrack notwithstanding. As ever, with Inside No.9, the references are completely en pointe (from Tolstoy to Angelina Ballerina to Planet Organic) and serve to place these extraordinary stories in recognisable worlds.

All the more powerful for when the twist, or reveal, arrives and in Diddle Diddle Dumpling that twist/reveal is both a powerful and an ultimately tragic one. You'll feel a chill up your back. From a story that began with such a ludicrous premise, that's an impressive piece of writing. But so is each and every episode of Inside No.9. More soon.