Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

^{Review by Daniel Tessier}

One of the most committed parodies of the 21st century, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace was first broadcast by Channel 4 in 2004, allegedly a repackaging of a long lost 1980s series that had previously only aired in Peru. Having been ditched by Channel 4 due to being incompetent and unbroadcastable, it was revived using surviving footage to fill a gap in the schedules due to “worst artistic drought in broadcast history.”

In reality, the series has it origins in the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe show Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight. Written by and starring Matthew Holness (The Office, Life's Too Short, Free Agents) and Richard Ayoade (The IT Crowd, The Crystal Maze, Gadget Man), the horror spoof show was the first appearance of their characters Garth Marenghi and Dean Learner. Also starring Alice Lowe (My Life in Film, Horrible Histories, Black Mirror), the show was nominated for the prestigious Perrier Award. The following year, a sequel show, Garth Marenghi's Netherhead, won.

Holness is Garth Marenghi, prolific horror author – or, as he prefers it, dreamweaver. Having written over 400 novels, including Afterbirth, Tomb Boy and CRAB!!, Marenghi decided it was time to take the next step by writing, directing and starring in a horror television series so radical it would change the course of human evolution. The series was financed, co-starred and edited by Marenghi's publicist, Dean Learner (Ayoade).

Darkplace, the show-within-a-show, is a nightmarish drama set within the eponymous Darkplace Hospital, which, in a stroke of bad luck, has been built over the very Gates of Hell. Although fifty episodes (or 67, or 200 depending on who you ask) were filmed, much of the footage was lost in the Thames, leaving only six episodes to be salvaged for 21st century broadcast. Garth Marenghi's Darkplace contains both these reconstructed episodes, and framing interviews and commentary, with Marenghi explaining the hidden messages “so there's no excuse for not getting it.”

Darkplace itself is a merciless and impeccably constructed parody of B-movies, zero-budget TV shows, histrionic dramas and alleged cult classics. It has been produced with perfect imperfection, a precise synthesis of incompetence. Marenghi's scripts are incoherent, often tail off without real conclusions, and filled with hilariously awful dialogue. (“As I rounded the corner, I felt muscular and compact, like corned beef.”) The footage is rendered as if recorded on scratchy film, the editing is jarring and choppy, the effects ludicrous, the gore over-the-top. The music (allegedly by one Stig Baasvik – actually the BAFTA-nominated Andrew Hewitt) is spot on, just the overly dramatic, absurdly intense thing you'd expect from a show like this. Even the classic Channel 4 ident, faithfully reproduced from the 1982 original, sets the scene for each episode.

Darkplace may have been inspired by not-so-classic supernatural hospital drama All Souls (the similar Kingdom Hospital, developed by Stephen King, aired after Darkplace, but its predecessor, Lars von Trier's Kingdom may have been an influence). Really, though, all manner of horror drama is sent up here, and it's too chaotic to parody any one specific thing. Darkplace Hospital is run more like a downtown police station, down to the doctors carrying guns.

Marenghi is an arrogant fantasist utterly convinced of his own brilliance, who is convinced Darkplace was originally shelved due to interference from the government and MI6 (or possibly MI8). His introduction to each episode, and the interviews that intersperse them, are a mixture of him extolling the greatness of his works, the failings of others, and paranoid ravings. In Darkplace, Marenghi plays Dr. Rick Dagless, who is, naturally, the hero of the show. A groundbreaking surgeon, war veteran, and former warlock, Dag is a no-nonsense maverick who, for some reason, makes his way round the wards in a souped-up golf cart. Holness delivers his lines as Marenghi in an abrasive, overly dramatic tone, which is then exaggerated even further as Dagless.

Learner portrays hospital administrator Thornton Read, desperately trying to keep things running in spite of the paranormal phenomena plaguing the hospital, and in fear of his never-seen boss, the furious Won Ton. While everyone's acting in the Darkplace show is deliberately awful, Learner's is spectacularly bad, and many of the obvious continuity errors occur due to what is clearly hasty editing to cut out the worst of his material. Learner is almost as big a fan of Marenghi as he is of himself, and blames himself for the show not getting picked up, as he didn't realise you were supposed to sell the show before you made it.

Joining them is Matt Berry (What We Do in the Shadows, The Mighty Boosh, Toast of London) as actor Todd Rivers, who plays Dr. Lucien Sanchez on Darkplace. Rivers is just as full of himself as Marenghi and is under no illusions as to how ridiculous the production is. Sanchez is the heartthrob of the hospital, with “impossibly coiffured hair,” and an impeccable singing voice. Berry delivers Sanchez's lines in an even more overly dramatic and oddly inflected method than he usually performs with, most of which are looped in just out of sync with the footage.

Alice Lowe plays Madeleine Wool, the least bad actor in the Darkplace cast, who is also the only one who doesn't appear in the interviews, having vanished somewhere behind the Iron Curtain shortly after Darkplace wrapped, and is now presumed dead. Wearing a truly statuesque wig, Wool plays Dr. Liz Asher, who has latent psychic abilities that do whatever the plot requires. Liz is treated dismissively by the male characters, in spite of getting an A at “Harvard College Yale.”

Among the guest cast are Julian Barrett in the recurring role as the Padre; his Mighty Boosh partner Noel Fielding as an “ape-oid;” Stephen Merchant as the hospital chef; and comedians Noble and Silver as a pair of especially wooden recurring extras. The six episodes run the gamut of nightmarish happenings. “Once Upon a Beginning” sees the Gates of Hell open, explosively, while “Hell Hath Fury” focuses on Liz as she goes Carrie and psychokinetically attacks her colleagues with office stationery and kitchen utensils. (Stephen King homages are never far, although while Marenghi parodies King to an extent, his novels are more like those of Shaun Hutson or James Herbert on a bad day.)

“Skipper the Eyechild,” perhaps the highlight, certainly the most bizarre episode, sees Dag take care of a bloodthirsty, one-eyed mutant baby, as a surrogate for his lost son, who was tragically born half-grasshopper. “The Apes of Wrath” has the hospital staff fall victim to a terrible plot to regress human evolution. “Scotch Mist” tackles the friction between the England and Scotland as a phantasmagorical fog transforms the good people of Romford into Scotsmen (shades of Monty Python's Flying Circus there). Another deadly mist strikes immediately afterwards in the finale, “The Creeping Moss from the Shores of Shuggoth,” which upsets Sanchez's love life as it slowly turns people to broccoli.

Holness and Ayoade have, since the original stage show, been utterly committed to maintaining the pretence of Marenghi and Darkplace's existence, completing all interviews on the subject in character, and with all publicity treating Darkplace as a genuine production. The only concession to reality is the final credits on each episode. Beyond that, Darkplace is presented as an entirely real lost programme. The 2006 DVD release goes all in on this, providing featurettes and deleted scenes within the fiction of the production, with Holness, Ayoade and Berry improvising audio commentary in character as Marenghi, Learner and Rivers.

In an ironic turn, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace did poorly in the ratings, perhaps due to its late night timeslot, and a second series wasn't commissioned. It has, of course, gone on to become a cult classic of exactly the type it was mocking. The legacy of Garth Marenghi has maintained, however. In 2006, Ayoade returned for the spin-off series Man to Man with Dean Learner, a parody chat show. Every guest was played by Holness, including Marenghi, promoting his new movie War of the Wasps. In recent years, Marenghi has returned, with Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome, the 2022 novel written by Holness, as Marenghi, in first person as horror writer Nick Steen (how many further levels of self-parody are possible?) The sequel’s, Garth Marenghi's Incarcerat. Both novels were accompanied by extensive book tours by Holness, in character as Marenghi, naturally.

Darkplace may be the worst television series ever to sully the Peruvian networks, but Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is an absolute masterpiece of absurdist humour, loving parody and sticking to the bit. Surely now, twenty years after its broadcast, roughly as long since Darkplace itself was allegedly filmed, it's time for a revival? Perhaps a repackaging of the 2004 series: Garth Marenghi's Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.