"You and he were... buddies, weren't you?": Remembering Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace

The cast of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace: Todd Rivers, Dean Learner, Garth Marenghi, Madeleine Wool (L-R)

Stephen King ain’t too shabby, but have you read The Yapping? Night of the Eczeman? What about Slicer IV: The Blade is Back?

Believe it or not, these pulse-pounding titles all trace back to the same brilliant mind. An admittedly conceited “language junkie” who wears a leather jacket and purple tie with fake gold sunglasses. A man who loves writing, but rewriting? Get lost. He’s an author, dreamweaver, visionary — plus actor. And yet he’s so much more.

His name is Garth Marenghi. And not a single Slicer novel actually exists.

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Recent history has seen no shortage of “talent watershed” moments, where an unlikely number of future stars all get their break at the same time in the same place. The lightning-in-a-bottle scenes that make you look back and say, “Wait a minute, they were all on the same TV show??”

Freaks & Geeks might come to mind, which served as a launch-pad for Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen, Linda Cardellini, Jason Segel, and that other guy. Or maybe the now-powerhouse actors from Parks & Recreation, or your favorite Saturday Night Live cast. But I would argue one singular pairing of young, raw, and incredibly talented people stands above the rest.

In 2000, a group of up-and-coming British comedians from Cambridge’s Footlights comedy troupe were given their chance to headline a BBC series. Bruiser didn’t last long – only six episodes – but served as a strong calling card for everyone involved. It was smart and funny and twenty-five years later is remembered for ushering in one of Britain’s most notable classes of entertainers.

Take Academy Award-winner Olivia Colman, who’s making her first on-screen appearance. Or Martin Freeman, who’s only a few years clear of his own debut. In the decades since, they’ve each helmed a number of unforgettable roles in both British and American media and cemented themselves in the cultural lexicon. Same goes for David Mitchell and Robert Webb, who may not possess quite as much overseas appeal but have remained staples of the British comedy scene for the past quarter-century. A pre-Office Ricky Gervais also wrote for Bruiser, as did Richard Ayoade.

But the last few names on the call sheet don’t quite hold the same name-brand recognition. Despite their talent, Charlotte Hudson has been out of the public eye for over a decade, and Matthew Holness hasn’t achieved the same level of fame as his co-stars. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t capable of it. For those wondering why I pivoted from a weird, schlocky author to a short-lived BBC series from the early 2000s, it’s because Garth Marenghi and Matthew Holness are one and the same.

Around the time he was gaining recognition for Bruiser, a 25-year-old Holness presented Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in a stage show written with Richard Ayoade and co-starring Comedy Lab alum Alice Lowe. It was the inaugural work to feature Holness’ new character: an egotistical, talentless Stephen King-esque horror writer with an “extensive canon of chillers” and a strong penchant for blood. The Perrier Award-nominated stage show was followed the next year by Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead, which won the prize outright.

The important thing to know about the Garth Marenghi character is that, despite being detached from reality, he’s always taken seriously within the confines of his world. Drop him into a traditional sitcom with a straight-man to put it all in perspective, and it wouldn’t work. But in his own realm, his own… “darkplace,” there isn’t someone around to tell him just how misguided he is as a person and a writer. Certainly not his publisher, the sociopathic Dean Learner (portrayed by Ayoade and introduced in Fright Knight).

That sort of unbridled freedom results in Marenghi having, by his own admission, “written more books than he’s read,” and gives him the necessary delusion to bring his tales of terror to the small screen. Or, taking a more realistic angle, here are simply two budding comedians in Holness and Ayoade who – like Phoebe Waller-Bridge later did with Fleabag – proved their concept on stage and got rewarded with a television show to cement it.

Which takes us to 2004 and into the depths of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, a show-within-a-show complete with gaffe editing, wooden acting, and doctors who somehow find time to fight the supernatural forces of evil in between trips to the pediatric ward.

If you’re confused now, don’t worry. It only gets weirder…

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It’s a stormy night in Romford, UK, and strange things are afoot at Darkplace Hospital.  The new hire, an honors graduate from Harvard College Yale, is showing signs of clairvoyancy. Her name is Liz Asher, and she doesn’t like what she sees: images of a blood-soaked wall, of guts and body parts coating the hospital floor. These concerns find their way to Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D., resident hotshot and former student of the occult. Evil is on the horizon, Liz insists, and it’s coming from Room 213 at Darkplace. This detail cuts through Dagless like butter as he reveals why he set aside the dark arts all those moons ago.

Darkplace Hospital in "downtown" Romford

The current patient in 213, he explains, is an old colleague named Larry Renwick. The two of them once made a pact to push each other as far as possible into the arcane, only they went too deep. Despite Dagless’ protests, Larry became determined to open the Gates of Hell underneath the grounds of the hospital. But the ritual went sideways, and although Dagless closed the portals as soon as he could, Larry went insane. And just last week he decided to go “axe-happy on a trout farm,” killing sixty fish and finding himself back at Darkplace where the Gates of Hell may be reawakened once more.

With his fellow doctor and good mate Lucien Sanchez (played by Todd Rivers, in turn played by Matt Berry), Dagless stands outside of Room 213 and braces for the confrontation to follow. It may very well decide the fate of the universe, but Sanchez has unrelated concerns. “You and he were… buddies, weren’t you?” he delivers in that music-to-the-ear voice. “Listen, when I first joined this hospital, I was strictly solo. You were the first real buddy I ever had. But if you and him wish to be best buddies again, I won’t stand in your way.”

The calm-as-can-be Dagless reassures his friend. “I’ve got a best buddy, Sanch. But some shit sticks no matter how hard you scrape.” Wise words from a wise man, yet what follows is a tale of gut-wrenching tragedy not even the Bard himself could conjure up. Dagless enters the room and greets his old friend, who breaks into a convulsion and… explodes, splattering the walls and ceiling with blood and guts. Liz’s vision has come true.

“I think I’m gonna die,” Larry whimpers after the explosion, now reduced to nothing but a fully cognitive head on the hospital floor. Dagless rushes to stop the bleeding but it’s too late, and Larry begs to be taken out of his misery. Dagless reluctantly grabs the nearest shovel and golfs his friend’s decapitated head across the room – traumatizing himself in the process.

Sanchez rushes in and lays eyes on the gruesome aftermath. “I’ll get a mop!” he affirms.

Dagless worries the explosion reopened the Gates of Hell and insists they need to burn the remains of Larry’s body, but his bureaucratic boss Thornton Reed (played by Dean Learner, played by Richard Ayoade) isn’t having it. As he points out in painful exposition, this whole thing opens them up to one hell of a scandal: “I’m not about to tell the immediate family of the deceased that we’re going to have to burn what remains of his body in order to close the portal to another dimension. I just won’t do it! This hospital’s got a reputation – which I intend to keep. I’ve yet to see any demons on the ward, and I’m particularly observant!”

With Reed – and Sanchez, for some reason – turned against him, and Liz thrown into the confines of 80’s television stereotypes, Dagless is forced to return to his regular duties as a doctor (oh yeah, that) and pray the portals have remained shut.

The hospital staff gathers at the cemetery a few days later for Larry’s burial. The sunny, cloudless sky sets the tone for what should be a peaceful day of mourning, but a gloomy Dagless remains on high-alert. As the priest laments the too-soon-exploding of Larry, his casket is lowered into the ground. But then it starts to shake. And shake... until Larry’s zombified (and surprisingly intact) corpse bursts out in a scene reminiscent of Romero.

Time slows as Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D. is faced with a life-altering decision. Does he shoot Larry in front of the man’s friends and family, or stay put and risk being torn apart by the hellspawn that’s manifested in his old pal? For the live-wire maverick, it isn’t a decision at all. He pulls out his revolver and takes aim at Larry’s possessed body. “Look out, he’s got a gun!” shouts a dubbed-in-post Sanchez.

Larry’s mother rushes towards Dagless and pleads with him not to pull the trigger, but he doesn’t hesitate. He shoots the mother, then lets the rest of his barrel loose on Larry. Thornton Reed fires off a few shotgun blasts for good measure, and Dagless pulls out a flamethrower to burn the body and any last trace of Larry Renwick.

In spite of his cold-blooded actions, a heavy toll has been taken on the good doctor. Silhouetted against a cascading fire that burns over the casket, Dagless mourns the loss of his fallen friend. He gives his pistol to an apologetic Reed, eager to be rid of the painful memento, and asks his boss to see about the mother. “I had to put a cap in her shoulder. Tell her… tell her I’m sorry.”

Dagless retreats to the hospital rooftop and watches the setting sun. Only his journey is just beginning. Despite his efforts at the cemetery, the portals have officially opened, and Dagless accepts his fate as protector of both the hospital and the universe: “From this day on, I’d have to fight these forces of darkness,” he narrates. “…And deal with the burden of day-to-day admin.” Dagless ashes his cigarette and calls it a night. Fade to black.

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Phew! Okay… you still with me? Because I probably wouldn’t be. What you just read in excessive detail is a synopsis to the pilot episode of Darkplace, a short-lived 80s television series written, directed by, and starring Garth Marenghi. It only ever found airtime in Peru, but in 2004, amidst the “worst artistic drought in broadcast history,” Channel 4 went against their better judgement and decided to air six of the fifty episodes.

To help steward in the demon-fighting exploits of Rick Dagless and co, the network agreed to air a special cut of the episodes that features exclusive interviews with the key players – Garth Marenghi, Dean Learner, and Todd Rivers. Madeleine Wool, the actress who portrays Liz Asher (played in real life by Alice Lowe), is surprisingly absent from the lineup, but we’ll get to that a bit later.

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, as we know it in the real world, consists of six episodes of the fictional Darkplace series intercut with these interviews. As you’ve likely deduced, all of the actors are playing multiple characters, and the layers of meta storytelling start to make sense. In Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, Matt Berry plays a pretentious actor named Todd Rivers. But in Darkplace – the show within the show – he plays Dr. Lucien Sanchez, suave sidekick to Marenghi’s Rick Dagless.

The camera is in on the joke in a way that must be seen to be believed. This isn’t a show produced by the undeniably capable Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade, but by Marenghi and Learner, and their incompetence is on display in every frame. From poorly dubbed dialogue to jarring continuity errors to Thornton Reed’s laughable line delivery, Darkplace is the complete package of so-shit-its-gold television. The closest comps are the “Lethal Weapon” episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but not even that does it justice.

Also, you read that plot summary, right? Not only does it sound like something from the mind of a deviant 12-year-old, but in actually watching the first episode, only about half of that storyline can be made out. Which makes Marenghi and Learner’s behind-the-scenes reverence for the material that much funnier. Garth calls it a “television program so radical, so risky, so dangerous, so goddamned crazy,” while Learner insists that the industry “would not make this show today… It was way the hell out there.” Even Todd Rivers seems blinded by the truth: “I think it’s a very brave and forward-thinking piece of writing, which I thought at the time, and I still do now.”

I won’t subject you to in-depth synopses of the other five episodes, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t lay out some of the drama. The second episode finds Liz Asher’s clairvoyancy spiraling out of control as she wreaks havoc on the hospital in Marenghian fashion (and by that I mean sexist). Figuring it’s “just her time of the month,” Dagless and Sanchez instead venture into the bowels of Darkplace in search of the true culprit. Thornton Reed eventually cracks the “puzzle,” and Dagless rushes to save both Liz and the hospital before they all succumb to her wayward powers.

Dagless goes rogue in the third episode to protect his newly adopted son, a mutant creature dubbed “Skipper the Eyechild” that a Darkplace patient died giving birth to (trust me, you don’t want more details than that). The hospital brass is desperate to kill Skipper and sweep this whole mess under the rug, but the baby reminds Dagless of his own son, a deceased half-grasshopper-half-toddler (you read that right), and he won’t let history repeat itself.

Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi as Rick Dagless in "Skipper the Eyechild"

The fourth episode revs up the action in a Planet of the Apes rip-off, and the following installment finds Marenghi swapping sexism for xenophobia when a “Scotch Mist” overruns the hospital. In the sixth and final episode, he returns to his roots of Shakespearean tragedy by penning a passionate yet doomed romance between Sanchez and Linda, a patient who’s turning into broccoli (again, you read that right).

“The Creeping Moss from the Shores of Shuggoth” doesn’t just save the series’ best episode title for last, also the best scene. Before he meets and falls in love with the “Broccoli Woman,” Sanchez is suffering under the weight of an unreciprocated crush on Liz. Cruising top-down in the hospital golf cart after being rejected, he puts his heart on his sleeve and imagines himself performing “One Track Lover,” an absolute banger that's worth two minutes of anybody’s time.

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As the credits roll on the Darkplace finale, the cast gets sentimental. “We didn’t know what it was going to achieve in the long run. We didn’t know it would still be, you know, talked about to these days,” says a humble Garth.

“You and he were… buddies, weren’t you?” Todd recites as he gazes into the distance, touched by the power of that moment. “Need I say more? Need I say more…”

And for Learner, “Garth’s place in history is assured” with the near-mythical Darkplace.

But wait a minute. Where the hell is Liz Asher? Her actress, Madeleine Wool, is conspicuously absent from all the mid-episode commentary, and her co-stars don’t even seem to notice she’s gone. Until “The Apes of Wrath,” that is, when we’re given our one big clue regarding her fate. With a face that suggests anything but genuine emotion, Dean Learner says, “It’s so hard to watch this episode knowing that she’s now missing, presumed dead. With the presumption heavily on dead… I don’t think they’ll find anything.”

Hold on... Did this guy kill her? It sure would fit with his characterization from the rest of the series. In the premiere, Learner admits to killing a cat actor for a tax-write off, and he doesn’t seem too bothered by the fact two production hands died during the filming of “Scotch Mist” (the fake fog they were using turned out to be poisonous gas).

And we haven’t even gotten to the DVD bonus features yet.

Before venturing into the true depths of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, we can get one thing out of the way for certain. Dean Learner, Garth Marenghi’s co-star and long-time publisher, is a serial killer.

Throughout the “Horrificata Illuminata” and “Darkplace Illuminatum” featurettes – which amount to an extra hour of interviews with the three remaining cast members – there are several more hints (more like flashing warning signs) that Dean Learner may be just a tad bit psychotic. Asked about the mysterious fate of the show’s main financier, he reveals that “Ahmed very, very sadly died. He was shot dead in his flat.” He also touches on a brief falling out he and Garth had back in the ‘80s, which patched itself up after Garth’s new representation “died suddenly.”

It's not until the end of “Darkplace Illuminatum” that Madeleine Wool is mentioned, and the words aren’t kind. “I could see the darkness in her eyes,” says Garth. “I knew that she’d done things with… ‘The Hornéd One,’” meaning the Devil. We’ll need to dig deeper for a definitive answer, or the closest thing to it, but at the very least her co-stars thought she was a legitimate witch.

I won’t spoil all the gems from these supplemental interviews, but it’s revealed they made the entire show without ever being commissioned by a network. They produced it, handed it to Channel 4, and were met with nothing but a blank stare (this is where the Peruvian market came in handy). As an author, Garth’s first book sold over a million copies, but by the time of the Darkplace re-release, his most recent chiller has only sold 219 (down to 173 after returns). The actors also provide a bit of context on why the show didn’t turn out so great from a technical standpoint, hinting at a potential on-set curse: “The turning point was the death of the grip. That’s when we lost the crew,” which had been widdled down to seven people from an original thirty.

Another memorable detail is Todd Rivers’ vitriolic hatred for platform shoes, which Garth Marenghi was accused of wearing on set. “Lifts, they’re called. These hugely arrogant stupid men, they’re as bad as fucking toupees… If you’re small, you’re small. You think anyone gives a shit if you’re five foot or five foot one?”

Okay, enough chit-chat. What happened to Madeleine? Enter the final layer of the Darkplace rabbit hole: a two-and-a-half-hour director’s commentary track in which Marenghi, Learner, and Rivers react to all six episodes in their entirety. In contrast to the regular interviews, throw them all in a room together and they can’t seem to shut up about Madeleine's death: “Hard to think all those bones and flesh and stuff just aren’t there anymore,” says Garth. “Nope, she’s dead. She’s bloody dead,” Dean adds.

At the end of the fourth commentary episode, we get a chilling revelation that changes the context of the entire show.

“I’m glad we fixed her hair,” Dean Learner throws out casually.

Silence. Todd eventually breaks it: “I take it you’re explaining the death there… you’ll have to be careful what you say.”

“You know, her son came into the office,” Garth adds. “I told him there’s nothing more we could do for him.”

Okay. Um. So it was all three of them. We don't get any more specifics across the commentary, but someone flag the authorities, eh?

The other main development in the commentary track (much less serious than the fate of Madeleine Wool) is Todd Rivers’ sudden realization that Darkplace is a steaming crock of shit and not, in fact, a revolutionary television program. This is framed to be the first time he’s ever actually sat through the entire show, and he struggles to contain his laughter amid the myriad of mind-boggling goofs and continuity errors – all of which Garth defends by pointing out the hospital is supernatural and not supposed to be realistic. Todd also grows frustrated with the mid-episode interviews, believing they kill the flow of the story: “These things are usually hidden extras or documentary. You don’t put this in with the actual show!”

These bonus features are hilarious and surprisingly dark and mostly play out as one long character exercise. It’s over three hours of Marenghi, Learner, and Rivers fielding questions and chatting with each other in an improvisational style, and it’s worth watching for that alone.

After Darkplace was canceled (in real life) in 2004, Richard Ayoade and Matt Berry both went on to achieve mainstream fame with The IT Crowd, and more recently, Berry broke through in the States with his Todd Rivers-coded role in What We Do in the Shadows. Darkplace guest stars like Noel Fielding and Stephen Merchant also found their places in popular culture.

But for reasons I do not have the answer to, Garth Marenghi himself, Matthew Holness, never quite escaped the niche bubble he created for himself here. He made his debut as a legitimate filmmaker with the 2018 psychological horror Possum, which earned strong reviews and attracted a cult following, and in 2020 he had a brief role in The Haunting of Bly Manor. But for most people out there he’ll always be known as Garth Marenghi, horror writer.

A role he seems to have embraced. Outside of an appearance on the short-lived spinoff Man to Man with Dean Learner (a whole different can of worms we’ll save for another day), Marenghi fell off the radar after Darkplace ended, only to come roaring back in recent years with two actual novels, TerrorTome (2022) and Incarcerat (2023). Holness took the character on an accompanying book tour for each release and proved that his quirky sensibility is alive and well.

Don’t worry, Madeleine Wool gets a happy ending too. Maybe not the character (as Dean is quick to point out, she’s bloody dead), but Alice Lowe has blossomed into a respected filmmaker of her own. She made her writing debut with 2012’s Sightseers and has gone on to write, direct, and star in the critically acclaimed films Prevenge (2016) and Timestalker (2024). I wonder if Marenghi, Learner, and Rivers would be able to comprehend her success. Something tells me they wouldn’t.

And with that, fellow traveler, we’ve reached the end of our journey into the macabre world of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. If you want to see a piece of truly surreal, creative, “WTF” television, go watch it on YouTube. And if you don’t, I mean, that’s cool too. Just don't go pissing off Dean Learner if you know what's best for you.

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Parting gift: an extended cut of "One Track Lover" featuring the angelic voice of Garth Marenghi himself (verse starts at 1:10)