Garth Marenghi's Darkplace
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is a comedy series made for Channel 4. Created by Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade, it is a parody of the horror genre and revolves around the character of Garth Marenghi himself, a writer of pulp fiction played by Matthew Holness.
The series' premise is that in the mid-1980s, Garth Marenghi and his publisher Dean Learner made their own TV series on a shoestring budget. Set in Darkplace Hospital in Romford, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace tells of the adventures of Dr Rick Dagless, MD, as he fights the forces of darkness while simultaneously coping with the pressures of running a modern hospital. In spite of the programme's obvious flaws - wooden acting, cringe-making scripts and amazingly poor special effects, to name but three - both Marenghi and Learner still regard the series as a masterpiece. But nobody else does, which is why it's taken nearly 20 years to reach the screen.
Of course, in reality the series is a deliberate send-up both of the horror genre and of 1980s TV production. Each episode also includes interview sections set in the present-day, in which Marenghi and his co-stars comment on the show-within-the-show, which provides an extra layer of character comedy.
The show's stars are:
- Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi, who plays Dr Rick Dagless, MD
- Richard Ayoade as Dean Learner, Garth's publisher, who plays Thornton Reed, Administrator and occasional Samuel Jackson lookalike
- Matt Berry as the actor Todd Rivers, who plays Dr Lucien Sanchez, improbably handsome with the disconcerting habit of losing lip-synch
- Kim Noble appears in every episode as "Jim", a hospital worker whose main function is simply to listen to Dagless reel off a lengthy speech and respond with a "yes" or other monosyllabic reply, and Julian Barratt appears in several episodes as the hospital's padre. Graham Linehan and
