Mild spoilers

Shut-in Ronnie is about to end his life when a knock at the door brings an unusual request. In a world full of dangers will the sage advice of Wise Owl bring him strength or be his undoing?

Off the bat I need to say that this episode deals with some very serious and dark subjects indeed. It’s strong material that will no doubt upset those who’ve been through some of what Shearsmith’s Ronnie has experienced. It’s the stuff of proper, adult drama and doesn’t pull its punches.

Throughout the story we flash back to a series of animated Public Information Films (PIFs), very much in the style of the old Charley Says cartoons of the early 1970s. These little films were often, quite intentionally, rather traumatizing, dealing as they did with such horrors as stranger danger, the potential lethality of electricity and so-called “safety” matches. Here they feature Wise Owl, who swoops in to save a little boy and girl from themselves. The impact of these sequences may initially be somewhat lost on younger viewers (I don’t think such things have been inflicted on post-Gen-Xers with any regularity) but for those of us of a certain age they spell doom from the get go. It’s not long before we realize we’re not merely watching “repeats” and that these have a direct connection to Ronnie.

At first I got the impression there was something of Psycho’s Norman Bates about Ronnie, at least the Bates of the original book. Like Norman he’s surrounded by taxidermy and seems to have no social skills; a man clearly with secrets. A video call from his mother (Call the Midwife’s Georgie Glen, a familiar and reassuring TV face) where he blatantly lies about his day adds to the effect, to the point I wondered if the call was real or in his head like the PIFs. In reality Ronnie is nothing of the sort; he’s a broken man whose depression is a wound from an injury done to him long ago.

It will come as no surprise as to what said injury roughly was, nor the identity of the perpetrator, but it’s nonetheless impactful when this is clarified. As I said, this is the stuff of powerful single-issue dramas with helpline numbers at the end, so I’m sure the subject has been tackled in much more depth elsewhere. But for a half-hour anthology show this doesn’t shy away from tackling the subject beyond just saying, self-evidently, “this is a very bad thing”.

Despite not having very much dialogue, Reece Shearsmith has rarely been better; there’s no sense of him playing this part because he happens to be one of the two stars of the show. It’s as strong a performance as any of the guest actors have given this season. Steve Pemberton’s onscreen contribution is slight this time but his story gives us this episode’s one big, albeit simultaneously horrifying, laugh. Plaudits also for Ron Cook (Chernobyl) for bringing a very difficult role to life and being able to sprinkle a touch of genuine humour over the darkness, as well as youngsters Isabelle Pratt and Dylan Hall for helping give the cartoon sequences a visceral authenticity.

Verdict: Not just a very strong Inside No 9 but a memorable slice of telly that will live in my head for a while. The fact they can come up with episodes this good seven seasons in is remarkable. It really can’t be anything but 10/10

Andy Smith