Inside No 9, BBC Two, review: not enough plot twists, all too much reliable farce

Dermot O’Leary appeared in the latest episode of Inside No 9 (BBC Two), playing himself. And he was very good at it. Now, this isn’t a given. Anyone still haunted by the memory of Richard Branson’s cameo in Friends will know that celebrities can be terrible at this sort of thing. Being an able media performer is not the same as being able to act.

But it turns out that O’Leary has excellent comic timing. It was a while before he popped up in the episode though. We began with Reece Shearsmith as Gareth, a man paralysed by paraskevidekatriaphobia, which – of course you knew this! – is a fear of Friday 13th. Gareth rang in sick, too nervous to go to work, but the bad omens started stacking up at home pretty quickly. A black cat on the gatepost. A magpie in the garden. An upside down horseshoe. A dancer walking into his house in a peacock feather headdress.

Shearsmith’s writing partner, Steve Pemberton, turned up in the guise of a locksmith named Barry. The postwoman (Samantha Spiro) had accidentally locked herself in the downstairs loo, you see, while delivering a parcel. If you’re familiar with Inside No 9, you will be on the lookout for plot twists and things that don’t add up. Gareth hadn’t called the locksmith, so something was awry. Clearly, the visitors to the house weren’t all they seemed. Surely this had something to do with Gareth’s wife, played by Amanda Abbington, whom we had seen in the opening minutes. You don’t cast a recognisable actress and throw her away in a two-minute cameo, do you?

And that was the fundamental weakness of this particular episode: the twists were telegraphed, particularly the final one. Gareth’s wife had set up the whole thing as a form of “exposure therapy” to cure him of his superstitions. The locksmith and the postwoman – and the lady in the peacock feathers – were actors. Then O’Leary turned up to present Gareth with a cheque for being the millionth caller to his show (he had rung to complain about Friday 13th coverage), before a last twist of fate that you could see coming from a mile off.

Best to enjoy this episode as half an hour of farce. There were some nice moments of slapstick, with Shearsmith negotiating his way around a ladder or accidentally drenching himself in the shower, while Pemberton and Spiro were amusing as luvvies treating the job with the utmost seriousness. It’s reliably good entertainment, even if the writers can’t pull the rug from under us every week.