the dark comedy that punked a nation

A game show with a shocking, grisly finale was part and parcel of an elaborate prank pulled on TV viewers in the UK by “Inside No. 9,” the BAFTA-winning BBC Two black comedy anthology series.

Fans of “Inside No. 9,” created by Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, thought they were going to watch a heavily advertised episode called “Hold On Tight,” set aboard a London bus with guest star Robin Askwith.

They were informed, about 15 minutes before airtime, that “Hold on Tight” was pulled and replaced by “3X3,” a new BBC game show hosted by veteran presenter Lee Mack.

As the “3X3” episode rolled along, complete with the requisite banter, corny jokes, flashing neon and three teams of nine awkward contestants answering trivia questions, it took a dark turn — ending with an unflinching contestant, Catherine, locking her mother, Margaret, in a soundproof booth and making her head explode in bloody carnage.

As the lifeless body falls to the ground, the crew screams in horror, and the episode, streaming Aug. 25 on BritBox, ends abruptly.

“When Reece and Steve delivered the script for ‘3X3,’ it was clear it was only going to work if it didn’t have either of them [in the cast],” said “Inside No. 9” executive producer Adam Tandy, who devised the fake game show ruse. “Somehow, we found a way of getting our audience to something that wasn’t billed as an ‘Inside No. 9’ episode — it had to feel like it was a real episode of something else.

“We really wanted it to be hidden in plain sight,” he said. “I said … ‘We’ll just have to come up with a cover story.’ The episode that everyone wanted to see is set about a No. 9 bus … and I thought, ‘OK, we’ll cobble together an idea for that episode.’ There was no script, and by the time I came up with [the bus idea] it was called ‘Hold on Tight.’ We thought maybe we should have somebody from a 1970s sex comedy like Robin Askwith [star], and by the time we finished the pitch they were already on the phone to Robin, because Steve [Pemberton] had worked with him on another show, ‘Benidorm.’

“We’d already started lying and disassembling our way to the airing of ‘3X3.’”

The “Inside No. 9” team had to deal with technical issues in order to pull off the deception. “There were an awful lot of complicated meetings with tech people and legal people at the BBC who didn’t want to appear to be lying to the audience [about ‘3X3’],” Tandy said. “We came up with a form of words the continuity announcer would say before the episode started that wasn’t exactly a lie but felt like we were replacing ‘Inside No. 9’ with something else.”

The team shot a fake promo for “Hold On Tight” — “about 30 seconds of [Askwith] head turns,” said Tandy, who wrote a fake synopsis for the press. The promo was included in the “Inside No. 9” season teaser.

The “3X3” episode was shot utilizing green-screen technology (to save money) and actors who hadn’t done a lot of TV. “It had to be multi-camera and look like a proper game show,” Tandy said. “Lee Mack has his own game show in ITV [‘The 1% Club’] and is also the team captain on a panel game show in Britain called ‘Would I Lie to You?’ so he was absolutely the right person [to host ‘3X3’]. Reece and Steve wrote some holder dialogue for him, maybe for a more unctuous game show host, but we always knew that whoever took the part would have to make it their own.”

Viewers watching “3X3” closely will notice that something is off with the “Bigwins” team, particularly the cues — verbal and otherwise — between stuffy mother and surly teenage daughter Margaret and Catherine. “The show had to look a bit like a car crash and we had to keep viewers watching so something had to be a bit off-kilter and heading for disaster somewhere along the way,” Tandy said. “So you start looking for the cracks in the presentation of the teams.”

“Inside No. 9” made headlines in 2018 when it aired a live episode that was apparently bedeviled by technical issues. “We lost about 20 percent of our audience when that happened and a lot of fans were disappointed and came back quite cross, like ‘How come we didn’t know?’ Well, that was the point, that you didn’t know,” Tandy said.

“We wanted to try to avoid that for ‘3X3’ and wanted it to feel there were enough clues to keep watching just in case — and the title, ‘3X3,’ equals 9, so that was a clue.

“The sort of slow creeping horror of a clearly abusive relationship between mother and daughter is hinted at all the way through,” Tandy said, “and then the actual reveal is done very quickly and is over in less than two minutes.”