Empty Orchestra start singing. The music was pumped up and we had a mini party, with mad dancing – that was a memorable scene to film." The filming introduced a number of technical challenges, with the producer Adam Tandy explaining that the simultaneous singing and conversing made production particularly difficult: "To record it all 'clean' and have options in the edit, that was technically hard on everybody." Typically, karaoke scenes in television will see characters sing only the opening lines, but because of the format of "Inside No. 9", the characters in "Empty Orchestra" sing the whole song. Each character sang a
Empty Orchestra with the story being told through the lyrics and the way the characters interact during songs. In comparison to other episodes of "Inside No. 9", "Empty Orchestra" is upbeat, features romantic elements, and lacks explicitly bloody or macabre references. The filming experience and resulting episode was a highlight of the series for Pemberton, but raised technical challenges, in part due to simultaneous singing and talking. Television critics had a mixed reaction to the episode. In both "The Telegraph" and "The National", it was characterised as weaker than others in the series. The change in tone dividing commentators, some of whom