maxypaw

Even watching this without the fakeout, this was still smart. Put on a believable yet still impressively bad pilot for a new BBC game show (hosted by who more believable than Lee Mack?), have some awkwardness, tried-and-tested ribbing and bad production design (and that oh-so accurate sound design, with the cheesy canned laughter and scene transition musics) and, if you've just got the show on in the background or you're passively watching the channel, you wouldn't expect much a thing. Well, until you get a nasty surprise at the end.

Of course, the rough edges can be explained away by the fact that this is a pilot, but beyond that the rug is slowly and deliberately pulled away from you; every so often an Inside No. 9 episode comes along where there's less of a twist and more a slow dawning, and this is exactly that. Of course, the multiple options that it could be are whittled down to one at the end - quite obviously waving it in the faces of both the audience and Lee, so clearly not thinking much of the show and getting an easy paycheck that it takes until the very last moment for even he and the crew to notice something is wrong. This isn't an episode where the end recontextualises everything, don't get that in your head - no, every step of a separate story slowly slips into place while piggybacking off your average, schedule-filler game show.