Shearsmith does misery well, and Ronnie is at peak despair. Wise Owl’s videos, which ring with the voices of a little girl and a little boy (voiced by Isabelle Pratt and Dylan Hall), begin to tell the story of a brother and sister. There’s a fire on the girl’s birthday. There’s a funeral. There are parents who blame the little boy.
A call from Ronnie’s mother and a visit from Ronnie’s father flesh out the truth of Ronnie’s history and stunted emotional growth with precision. As usual Shearsmith and Pemberton’s script is exceptional, packed with pathos, drip feeding info to the increasingly horrified audience (it is probably worth noting that some might find this episode triggering due to the final reveal of what Ronnie’s father (played by Ron Cook), the voice of Wise Owl, actually did to his son on that fateful day).
Pemberton’s neighbour pops up a second time later in the show when he realises that it’s Ronnie’s father and not him who is the taxidermist. But by that point it’s too late. In the show’s grossest but funniest Wise Owl video, the little girl and boy are shown how to taxidermy their dead cat in graphic detail. “Easy if you know how!” says the inappropriately chipper Owl. Not so. Grown up Ronnie has had a go with the neighbour’s bunny and it has not gone well.
This is Inside No. 9’s first foray into animation and it works to great effect. ‘Wise Owl’ is surely as macabre as anything the show has done before and the public service videos of adorable but slightly shonkily drawn kids in everyday peril will no doubt set off legacy anxiety for viewers of the right age. It’s a cracking finale to the series which will likely linger like a badly taxidermied rabbit. Sad, haunting, grotesque but also kind of funny at the same time.
