 Rarely, if ever, has there been a work of satire so niche, so poorly understood and represented on its initial broadcast, but which is recalled with such incredible fondness by those who experienced it. Garth Marenghi's Dark Place: A Retrospective by George Daniel Lea During my early twenties, as a student barely able to keep mind and body together, I recall happening across a late-night broadcast of a show that hooked me almost from the first instant: Crude, poorly shot, ludicrously acted, edited and conceived, I couldn't help but be intrigued enough to not only keep watching, but tune in for every broadcast thereafter. It was only with further exposure to the show I began to realise that, not only were its various technical crudities part of a sophisticated series of running gags (essentially a loving lampoon of crude televisual tropes and shortcomings of 1980s broadcast television), the show knows its subject matter so intimately (in this instance, mass-published horror media of the same era), its various spoofs, satires and show-ups are some of the most trenchant in all of comedy. Purported to be a genuine TV production (albeit one that was never officially aired or even commissioned), Garth Marenghi's Dark Place is a scalpel-sharp satire of genre TV, horror fiction and the cults of personality that so often predominate such phenomena. Marenghi himself is a brilliantly Frankensteinian creation, marrying characteristics from the likes of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, James Herbert, Clive Barker, Shaun Hutson and numerous others fans of the genre will instantly recognise, suffusing the resultant “monster” with a vein of pretentious ignorance that makes itself plain every time he pontificates on subjects he has no business speaking about (everything from horror as a genre and the craft of writing to politics and philosophy are -according to the man himself- part of Marenghi's dubious purview). The genius of the character is how lightly the satire is played; writer and creator Matthew Holness manifests Marenghi with such straight-laced pomposity and narcissistic self-importance, it's almost possible to become inveigled into the mythos of high art that he spins around the show, no matter how ludicrous or absurd it actually gets (indeed, I recall speaking to those who'd perhaps only glimpsed the show or not taken the time to appreciate its satirical nature before switching channels who believed its sincerity).  Alongside his rogue's gallery of supporting cast, Marenghi comes across as a clueless, self-important, irascible individual who comprehends little, yet has somehow managed to cobble together a self-sustaining industry around himself in a manner akin to the legendary Tommy Wisseau. Part of the show's sincere genius is its painting of a world as hapless in its assumptions as Marenghi himself. Parodying pompous, self-mythologising documentaries on similar creative endeavours, the various “talking head” interviews that intersperse the episodes of Dark Place treat entirely risible material as high art, weaving a mythology around the show so sincerely communicated -in its ignorance-, it's hard not to get swept up in the self-congratulatory bravura of it all. Marenghi, alongside his editor (night-club owner, pimp, director, editor, cast-mate and general raconteur, Dean Learner) and actor Todd Rivers (magnificently played by the legendary Matt Berry) provide dubious elucidations throughout each episode, commenting not only on the diastrously under-qualified, chaotic (and purportedly lethal, in one or two instances) creation of the show, but also procrastinations on writing, art, acting, direction, philosophy, politics, all of which seem to be derived from 1980s US serials and day-time TV shows (Quantum Leap, The A-Team etc) that were imported onto UK screens. The ego, assumption and general lack of intelligence on display is played with just enough sincerity to lend it a patina of seriousness. Were those performances a molecule more absurd, were the statements they make an inch more extreme, the show would lose something essential to its integrity, i.e. the contrast between these moments of -often quite solemn- speculation and the ill-conceived ridiculousness of Dark Place itself. The dichotomy lends the show a certain complexity of flavour, leavening the sillier moments and sequences of visual or slapstick comedy with a delicious quality of audience doubt. Despite how ridiculous the show gets, the constant insistence that one is experiencing high and forbidden art leaves the audience in a constant quandary: Is this indeed some satirical take on genre television and fiction, as conceived by a genius who wholly apprehends the tropes and conventions of those phenomena? The answer is yes and no; Marenghi himself is totally oblivious to any irony that derives from the show's short-comings. He and his fellows take their work incredibly seriously, and will brook no suggestion that it is anything less. Matt Holness, on the other hand, is acutely aware of that which he satirises, and has a great love of the various genres and mediums the show sends up.  This is nowhere more evident than in the realisation of Marenghi himself: the beats that he hits are extremely niche, the references he manifests esoteric to the point of obsurity. Yet, for those of a similar frame of obsession, the references chime profoundly, and reveal that Holness is as much a horror and science fiction buff as he is someone who perceives the short-comings inherent to their popular manifestations. Who would, for example, note Marenghi's deployment of highly idiosyncratic and abstruse terms such as “The Fantastique,” which is a sly dig at Clive Barker's early interviews and TV appearances, or visual elements such as his leather jacket which echo the manner in which James Herbert often appeared in public? Who but horror fans would get the joke of Marenghi himself setting up an institute to harness the apparent psychic potential of children (an overt reference to Stephen King's fascination in his fiction with the same subject)? This is not a cruel or mean-spirited piece of work; trenchant and merciless as it can sometimes be, it also has an incredible love for its subject matter. The sadly limited run of six episodes each revolve around tropes, story structures and subjects familiar to any fan of genre fiction, referencing everything from Doctor Who to the body-horror works of David Cronenberg, TV classics such as Day of the Triffids, Planet of the Apes, the various works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe, as well as -stylistically- numerous US TV shows, whose tropes and style of storytelling, cinematography etc the show shamelessly cribs from. Expect absurdities such as exploding ambulances, fast-action (and deliberately poorly shot) chase sequences, horror-comedy segments involving telekinetically-animated office furniture, guns, guns, guns and more guns (bearing in mind the show is ostensibly set in a British hospital) and even a musical sequence in the final episode that is as incongruous as it is hilarious.  In terms of the landscape of British comedy at the time of its airing, Dark Place stands as one of the most idiosyncratic and unusual works in the arena. At a time when British comedy was pervaded by political satire and social commentary (owing to the cultural upheavals of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the various broken promises and atrocities committed by the Blair administraton etc), Dark Place dared to derive comedy from an extremely niche subject, playing to an audience whose erudition and intelligence it had to assume in order to make any kind of impact. Despite Channel 4's frankly baffling marketing and shunting of the show to a graveyard slot on weekday evenings, it only found its audience, but has sustained a mythic status all these years later, such that calls for a return to Dark Place in one medium or another are de rigeur in horror and genre fiction circles. Garth Marenghi himself has become cemented as an ironic figure within the echelons of popular horror writers, such that fans spin their own satires around him and his body of work, from essays, interviews and articles to Twitter stories and blog posts exploring -in fittingly wry fashion- the impact that Marenghi's writing has had on various creators. A significant factor of the show's success is the aforementioned respect it has for its target audience: at a time when focus-grouped and written-by-committee, edited-by-test-audience projects were producing the most bland, inoffensive work imaginable, Dark Place remained steadfastly true to its core spirit and foundational conceits, relying on its audience to be literate and intelligent enough to understand its satire and the molecular detail that pervades every performance, sequence and episode. It might seem strange to the casual viewer to state, but appreciation of Dark Place in its totality requires a sincere degree of background in horror, science fiction and genre media in general, not to mention an understanding of 1970s/1980s TV trends and tropes. This makes the show an incredibly unique project with a deliberately targeted and exclusive core audience. Rather than attempting to dilute itself in order to appeal to a wider demographic (always death to any sincere creative project), Dark Place doubles down at every instance, throwing out references and visual gags that only those immersed in such topics will even perceive, much less understand. For all the overt silliness and -aesthetic- crudity of the show, the subtlety of its comedy cannot be over-emphasised: For every slapstick gag or cleverly masked joke, there are a hundred visual details, felicities of performance, writing and direction that aren't laugh out loud funny, but feed into the ethos of the show and make it an environment where humour foments. This is even evident in the physical editing; scenes are deliberately choppy and poorly constructed, continuity is a gaff-laden nightmare and framing is naïve as only something produced by those with no background, training or experience in film can be. Performance-wise, this factor is particularly acute with regards to Dean Learner, ably played by Richard Ayoade, whose “performance” as Thornton Reed is bad in a way that only a truly great actor could conceive: Learner constantly misses his marks, doesn't know where to stand, glances at the camera, mugs, runs through his lines without emphasis or emotion and interacts woodenly with the props on set. It's a genuinely brilliant performance that identifies everything that an actor can do wrong and goes for it with gusto. This factor is complemented by various sequences in which rushed and poorly-dubbed voice-overs have been used to communicate exposition or back story. Catching these sequences in isolation, audiences might be forgiven for wondering what in blue Hell they've discovered, how any product airing on TV could be quite so bad. However, as part of the whole, they are sincerely brilliant details that serve to complexify the final product, layering in shades and levels of humour it might not otherwise possess. Nothing here is arbitrary, from line-readings to framing, from the physical performances of actors to the jerky, often baffling editing decisions. Dark Place thereby provides a satire not only of genre fiction, but of televisual media itself: Marenghi and his team are effectively presumptuous ignorami who have no idea what they're doing or the protocols and processes of production, but do it anyway, driven by an unshakeable belief in the apparent artistry of their project that's as oddly admirable as it is bone-headedly, obsessively masochistic (whilst there's little elucidation regarding the untimely end of the project, Marenghi, Rivers and Learner provide subtle suggestions of a disastrous conclusion, which -purportedly- resulted in the deaths of crew members, the suspicius disapprearance of lead actress Madelaine Wool and various unspecified criminal investigations). The apparent “salvaging” of the legendary TV show some twenty years later is treated like a renaissance, an event that has almost spiritual significance for television and wider fiction, despite the evidence of the audience's eyes and ears. Dark Place's presumptuous inneptitude is ignored in favour of a self-inflating mythologisation, that talks about all involved as though they're operating on a level that general culture and more humdrum mortals can't begin to conceive. The delivery of these assessments is played so straight, it's possible to often miss the subtle linguistic jokes and references the cast crack, as well as to be sincerely drawn into the narrative oneself. Rarely, if ever, has there been a work of satire so niche, so poorly understood and represented on its initial broadcast, but which is recalled with such incredible fondness by those who experienced it. If you're an aficionado of horror media -or genre works in general-, Garth Marenghi's Dark Place is essential viewing. To paraphrase the man himself, if you're yet to experience the phenomena: “...put conventional logic to one side, and enjoy. Well, I say enjoy...” Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome |
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