10 Amazing TV Shows You've Probably Never Heard Of
5. Garth Merenghi's Darkplace (2004)
The brainchild of comedians and writers Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade, the Garth Merenghi character was taken from their award-winning stage shows.
The high concept was that, back in the 1980s, the narcissistic but delusional horror author Marenghi had created a showcase series for Britain’s Channel 4 TV channel entitled Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Set in Darkplace Hospital, built on the gates to Hell, each episode saw all manner of weird and spooky goings on, dealt with by Marenghi’s alter ego on the show, Vietnam and Falklands veteran and former warlock Dr. Rick Dagless (played, of course, by Marenghi himself).
Supposedly, fifty of the ‘visionary’ Marenghi’s eerie, prophetic scripts were filmed but then mysteriously shelved by Channel 4 without being aired - until now…
Filmed as closely as possible to the standard of the time, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace looks and sounds like the DVD release of an old low budget eighties show, but includes up-to-date talking heads style commentary on the older footage to give the project an altogether different, even more hairbrained perspective.
With the actors playing terrible actors playing terrible characters in a terrible TV show so bad that even Channel 4 in the eighties wouldn’t show it, and then playing those terrible actors two decades later pontificating about the show’s importance, Holness and Ayoade had created two completely disparate comedies - the mockumentary and the absurdist parody - and then beautifully meshed them into one TV show.
Holness and Ayoade are pitch perfect in their dual roles, particularly Ayoade, and Matt Berry and Alice Lowe deliver brilliant performances alongside them. Ayoade, who co-wrote and directed every episode, went on to a career in film as an award-winning writer/director.