Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace

2000s British tv comedy series

Garth Marenghi, the horror pulp books author, presents the highlight of his career - the TV series called Darkplace in which he played the main character. Together with his producer and one of the actors he recalls that groundbreaking show.

Comedy series created as extension to theater plays about Garth Marenghi, the author of pulp fiction horror stories. This time he presents the highlight of his career - the 1980s TV series called Darkplace, where strange things happen every day. The tacky, cheap production filled with amateur actors and corny dialogues, but in mind of Marenghi it was a multi-layer and groundbreaking show. He presents some of the episodes and explains why it was so controversial and why was it hard to create such show.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is a brilliant idea for comedy series - all the elements of the show are stylized to look like cheap 1980s show like The A-Team or The Knight Rider. Intentional poor acting, cheesy scripts and horrible directing are creating the perfect setting for the pulp horror stories, but here the problems have begun. All of the elements listed above worked well, but the creators managed to put very limited number of jokes in the scripts. The parody bit worked well, but the content of the show is not very impressive. We get a wonderful facade, but there is not much behind it.

Overall it was brilliant idea, but the project failed on execution - parody and farse are nice, but some jokes thrown in would make it much better. The creators kept too close to the shows that they were trying to ridicule and thus some of the scenes were completely obsolete or far too long to keep the show fresh and interesting.

Rating	5.2
Funny	4 / 10
Entertaining	3 / 5
Characters	3 / 5
Nonrepetitive	3 / 5