#sheece rearsmith

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thanks to the wayback machine i now know how reece announced his upcoming appearance on bakeoff

absolute props to the lad, this is incredibly funny to me

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it's official: reece wants to be bummed to death

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me staring at reece shearsmith: a statistical analysis

70%: he pretty :3

30%: trying earnestly to comprehend how young reece and old reece are the same person

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uhhhhh so there's a moment in this clip of "bad sugar" where reece wrinkles his nose and his glasses go up and it's adorable and i wanted to make a gif of it

butttt they cut away from him really quickly after he does it and so uh

i have made a terrible gif mistake XD

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#ok omg i'm fascinated by this :o <3#the q has been asked re lisgoe/nick “who does reece know with a neck tattoo” the answer is STEVE'S MUM?!#(it could have been makeup obv but she's in shot so briefly and fuzzily for it to not be worth it)#(i spotted most of them sat eating tray lunches *at a ping pong table* wtf XD)#they're all so cuuuuuute!!#tlog#the mums

also, for anybody who's playing along at home with Chippy Neurotic Comedy Blorbo Bingo: reece's mum's vibe isn't really that dissimilar to james acaster's

The Gents and their mums, who all had non speaking background parts as inmates of HMP Clitclink.

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SPOILERS for Inside No 9: Stage/Fright!

I was lucky enough to attend the matinee performance on 25th Jan, and now I'm going to ramble about it :D

I'm given to understand that y'all who want them are already adequately furnished with plot summaries etc (excited to read them! waiting to do so until after I've got all this down) - so I won't worry about deep-diving. This'll be a mix of things that particularly struck me, and details that would have been unique to the performance I saw :)

I sneakily secretly got front row tickets (!!) for me and @toosicktopray, and I didn't tell them where we were going until we got there (I didn't even tell them we were going anywhere until that morning!) :D Then afterwards we got to meet up with @silverview and @unreesonable, and we ended up just chatting shit for hours! The boys didn't come to the stage door (apparently because "they're old men" :P) but that was better, frankly <3

Opening "theatre" skit/front-of-curtain prologue:

oh, this has Reece's fingerprints all over it! Getting to sit and simmer with comic rage over literally the exact same things that he's frothed with comic rage about on podcasts? Having no lines to need to learn, and then getting to do a bunch of revenge-fantasy murders? And get spattered with stage blood? Go off :3

aaaa one of Reece's secretly-poppers quick-change shirt buttons had popped open when he came front-of-curtain (probably got overenthusiastic doing his murdering) - maybe the third one down, at his upper stomach - and all I saw underneath was what I presumed to be a white undershirt, so I went back to staring at his face - but toosicktopray caught a little glimpse of his fluffy tummy above it!! (so it was probably actually his mic belt or something)

BCDR:

When they knocked down the wall during Brown Bottles, there was this great WHOMPH of air (and bits of dust and stuff, according to toosicktopray :P) right into the front row :O

Also it took Reece/Tommy two goes to actually smash the brown bottle over Steve/Len's head :P (the first time it just went "boink" XD)

Credit where it's due, Steve's very good at doing the not-actually-his-own-hand stuff :D (love me some of that shit). I'd say not all of the routines necessarily worked as well live as they do with the camera angles in the ep, but imo honestly that one was better :)

Kidnappers Sketch:

Wheelie bin with an 18 (1+8 = 9, or two 9s) on it in the background scenery!

toosicktopray saw the hare. Where? There, on the stair!

I'm not the biggest Quiet Night In enjoyer, but I liked the characters better with dialogue, tbh :)

It took Reece/Tommy(/Geoff or whoever the fuck he's being) two goes to fire the gun XD "It's not even loaded. [gun doesn't go off] I'll try that again."

Our special celebrity guest was Gary Kemp! He really went for it, to the extent that I think Reece was breaking character (smirking) a bit while e.g. waiting for him to finish a much longer flamenco than expected XD The charade (as has been documented) was "Car Reek Hemp", and it was quite funny watching Reece frantically yell out lots of synonyms for hemp, which Steve was miming as you might expect ("dope! skunk! uh, weed!"). Couldn't help thinking about "The Quiet Ones! The Quiet Things! Be Quiet...!" The way Len incensed him was to keep singing "I know this much is true" except substituting in e.g. "glue", "poo". Missed opportunity to callback it in Tears of Laughter ("laughter is my memory of poo" "it's you!"), which would have been overambitious/flow-breaking, but amusing. Also jokes about mistaking him for his brother :P ("I loved you in Eastenders!" "That was Martin!" "I thought your brother was called Reggie?" "That's the Krays!")

Briefly glimpsed Reece's trademark cartoonist block lettering on the pad they hold up for the celeb to read off! <3 I feel like the bit of paper with '9'/'6' on it might have been his handiwork too?? The attention to detail <3

Terreur de l'Asile

Pahahaha well now it's getting bonkers :D

Ticked off my bingo card: Reece going boink boink boink :3 (in the Elements Song)

Ticked off Reece's bingo card: getting forcibly restrained with one arm bent up behind his back :P If you had complete creative co-control over what you had to do once a day for the next ten weeks (and twice on Saturdays)...

ohoho speaking of which how about Steve taking control of your mind and forcing you to do his bidding o.O

I like Hugo's character design :) Always a fan of braces! I think I used to have a pair that was quite similar, actually, which was distracting :P And his floofy curls :D

I like Marcus too! With his wig that's kind of just a younger Reece's hair :P wandering around in his bloodstained sawn-off pyjamas XD Very here for both the ludicrous melodrama and the arch meta reveal :P

Kooky popstar woman was so good! They were all great, but her especially :) doing her "dead face" and her hammy audition tape :D

Ahh the conceit with her taking the camera backstage was so imaginative and super creepy! Shades of Dead Line. Christ, when the person unseen picks the camera back up again D:

Oh no, poor Reece, having to get choked to death every night and twice on Saturdays :3 (but also, having to embody any degree of sexual energy just beforehand, which... not really his forte?! :P)

Curtain call, and beyond:

Ahhh that was a fun show. Wait, what? WHAT? WHAT THE FUCK, STEVE? STEVE! YOU'RE MAKING ME FEEL INSANE! Oh my god there's MORE, what NOW?! :D

Hahhh omg he killed him again XD

"Reece Shearsmith, 1969-2025" now that's fucking ballsy to do in January X'D

Hahhh omg he killed him again!!

Aaaah Reece in his pretty white Marty Hopkirk getup! <3

Ticked off Reece's bingo card: be a ghost :3 god he'd fucking love that... "if nobody can see me, then nobody can notice me, then I can't do anything wrong" D:

"All I get is fucking Little Toby!" okay FIRST OF ALL: Toby's real name is Toby :D and SECOND OF ALL: Reece calling his own understudy little?! :D

The idea of Reece falling to his death through a trapdoor shouldn't be as weirdly delightful as it is XD

For the James Acaster enjoyers: "Every ghost story is a love story when you love ghosts" :P (- toosicktopray)

Good gracious, they have never been so Morecambe and Wise as suddenly appearing in top hat and tails stage left while all the chorus folks are vigorously waving fans stage right :P

Awww, they finally found another Nine to be Inside, and it was Cloud! :3

Loose change thoughts:

Bloody lovely use of lighting throughout - subverting things by turning it on the audience, using bright light to mask what's happening in darkness (e.g. suddenly fucking Little Toby!!) - and I didn't know using onstage cameras/screens was becoming a theatre trope, but I enjoyed how they messed with it :)

OK, so, some of Reece's characters wear glasses (including "himself", wearing his "own" "everyday" glasses), and some don't - fascinated to know whether he's got prescription costume glasses and is just pushing through the blur the rest of the time (seems both unlikely and unsafe!), OR whether he's wearing contacts and all the glasses are fake including his "own" "everyday" glasses <3

A perfectly entertaining show all round but dear god when they pulled us into Steve's shared hallucination that fucking Little Toby had been Reece all along it felt like a crackfic unfolding before my very eyes XD Utterly deranged behaviour and it tickled me so much!! The canon-typical meta nonsense and fridge uncanniness of it all! The implication that we too are so obsessed with Reece that we hallucinate him along with Steve (uhh don't @ me)! The way it retroactively both completely centres Reece in the narrative (even when he's playing a character) (me staring at every Reece character going "mmm, Reece": justified) and simultaneously completely erases him from it!... GO OFF, LADS XD

And the fucking audacity of them to position themselves as in the Morecambe and Wise mould! People will hate it and I bloody love it XD I mean, yes, to us, the fans, the comparison is perfectly apt - silly fluffy adorably-close Northern comic geniuses - but imagine, for the casual viewer/journo - it's those two ghoulish twisted fuckers from that thing in the 90s with the nosebleeds, what's their names again, that write those gory bleak plays full of death and tragedy and then slap the "BBC Comedy" logo on them, and they're playing at being the most famous, beloved and wholesome comedy double act in the history of British television?! Oh my fucking god I can't wait for press night ;)

Similarly, the way it was basically wall-to-wall vaudeville and knob gags, which, sure, we expect (and frankly makes the most entertaining use of their talents in a live setting - it's well-executed vaudeville and knob gags), but, uh, probably has more Actual JokesTM total than the entire TV series put together (and about 300% less horror and heartbreak than your average ep). Again, I was utterly down for it! Some folks... will be less so XD

Is there anything they can't do?... uh, write a single coherent two-hour plot-line, apparently XD (hey, man, I get it! I'm a one-shot guy too! ;) )

All in all, a very fun and silly time! By all means Ask Me AnythingTM, unless possibly it's about Steve, bc he could have had his fly open the whole time and I wouldn't have noticed XD

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complete the tlog photoshoot concept: all of them in their bow ties and dinner jackets except for reece, who is...

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Memories of doing these... Circa 1992 (Illustrations by Reece) - dean shearsmith @shears20

!!! i'm dying of how adorable these are 😭😭😭

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Being, as I am, old enough (and British enough) to remember Alas Smith and Jones, I found this an absolute hoot XD

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um hello?? yes please :3 (x)

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However weird and idiotic the setup of the shot looks, I still like the subject to look and feel their best. - Matt Crockett, photographer

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(x)

is any other review needed

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GOD WAIT OKAY, the bit right at the end of tlog s3, where geoff's bandaged up in the hospital and surrounded by visitors and he's making them all laugh, is it a fucking METAPHOR for reece feeling most comfortable and confident when his face is hidden (i.e. under makeup/behind a character)???

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hands up if you're currently crushing on reece shearsmith and you don't have a weird fetish 🤔

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this happened in my brain, so now it has to happen on your dash

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i want US to read them!! this is from 2011! there's bugger-all on ao3 prior to 2021! WHERE were they hiding them?? :'(