Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace – All 4
Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. You’ve probably seen many a clip from the 2004 series on YouTube, but you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t seek out and watch the entire six-episode series.
Adapted from an award-winning Edinburgh Fringe show, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is formulated to be a show within a show. It stars Matthew Holness (playing Garth Marenghi, who plays Dr Rick Dagless, M.D.), Richard Ayoade (playing Dean Learner, who plays Thornton Reed), Matt Berry (playing Todd Rivers, who plays Dr Lucien Sanchez) and Alice Lowe (playing Madeleine Wool, who plays Dr Liz Asher)… and breathe.
The show is set out as a ‘lost tapes’-style supernatural hospital drama based on Garth Marenghi’s books, and features commentary by the actors who played the characters on the show… stay with me. It’s purposely crap – a parody of old low-budget horror projects from the ’70s and ’80s, and it’s tremendously well done. All of Matt Berry’s lines are overdubbed for seemingly no reason other than “it’d be funny, lol”.
There’s a lot of layers to the show and it’ll require more than one watch to really soak everything in, which is lucky because you could watch this very short series in about three hours and it’s available on All 4 right now!
Concludes over the page…