Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Lee Mack, Sally Breton, Bobby Ball, Marcia Warren, Stephanie Levi-John, Ben Crowe, Billy Lydon, Michael Fenton-Stevens, Francesca Newman, Finlay Southby, Max Pattison.

You either love Halloween or you hate it, you can see it as a night of childish fantasy, or an import, a moment in which we party at the expense of someone else’s culture, the trick or the treat, whichever way you look at it, it is only for one night.

Halloween is also a time for cinema to go overboard in its showing of films designed to scare you, to take you to the edge of your limit of endurance and aside from a few notable exceptions, there has been little that television writers and producers have come up with to equal the sense of the science behind the scream.

It is though the sense of the ordinary just taken slightly askew that can make the world seem off putting, frightening, concerning, enough to make anyone think twice about staying, that Not Going Out would be the best option in which stay safe, to keep the seriousness of the world at bay.

Whilst the Halloween special doesn’t truly capture the dynamic built up over the last several series between Lee Mack and Sally Breton, nor does it involve stalwarts of the show in recent years Hugh Dennis, Abigail Cruttenden, Geoffrey Whitehead and Deborah Grant, but in the pairing of Lee Mack and the effervescent Bobby Ball as his father and the sensational timing of Marcia Warren, there is more than enough for fans of the show to get their teeth into.

Lee Mack has become somewhat of an institution, good comedy which might not break down barriers, but which stands in the tradition of the greats, the escapism instead of the confrontational, and on a night like Halloween, it is a period of time in which the observation of his craft gives the audience that sense of time being slightly askew, off balance, but still truly enjoyable.

There can be nothing more likely to set the pulse spinning and the breath quickening to paint the picture of the bloodcurdling pressure of the social mistake, the faux pas, and as the Not Going Out Halloween special plays out, it is to Lee Mack that the viewer can rely on for that tension build and the inevitable pin prick of release.

With a wonderful premise must come the hero of the hour and in Marcia Warren, the framing of the old woman alone in the creepy looking house, takes on the horror film style with insight and gags that work well.

An enjoyable feast, perhaps not quite up to the standards set out by the six part series but as a one off celebrating a time of year we are not really invested in outside of cinema, it is one that raised the spirits ahead of the new series coming in 2020.

Ian D. Hall