Holness made one of the funniest things British television produced in its decade and then walked away from comedy almost entirely. Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is the reason to know his name; the horror he has made since is where he wants to be.
Fi1m perspective
Dr Rick Dagless whispers. Matthew Holness plays him staring at a point just past the camera, a man who has read somewhere that heroes are quiet and has taken it as an instruction. Around him Matt Berry booms and Richard Ayoade carries a shotgun through a hospital, and Holness holds still, which is the harder job. Then he steps out of the show as Garth Marenghi, horror novelist, who by his own account has written more books than he has read, and introduces each episode with a gravity the footage cannot support. Both parts are the same joke, and Holness plays both without once letting on that he knows.
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) runs six half-hours, built with Ayoade and Billy Brown, and it is the reason most people know his name. The character came first, on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe; the series then got every detail of bad 1980s horror television right, down to the wrong word stressed in every sentence. We scored it 83 and stand by that, with the caveat that it is one joke and should be taken an episode at a time. Before it there was Simon, the IT technician in the second series of The Office (2001), the awkward, faintly snotty sort he has gone on playing in other people's comedies ever since.
And then, for the best part of a decade, not much that anybody saw. Critics took to calling him the lost boy of British comedy, which missed the point: he had not gone missing, he had gone into horror. A Gun for George (2011), a short he wrote, directed and acted in, follows a hack writer who mythologises himself, Marenghi with the laughs taken out. Possum (2018), his first feature, adapted from his own short story, is a psychological horror about a damaged and unreliable man, its dread built from picture and sound rather than shocks. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. Alice Lowe, who played Liz Asher's sincerity in Darkplace without a flicker, is one of the few collaborators he has worked with twice.
What made Darkplace last is that Holness knows what the good version of every bad scene would be. We laughed hardest not at Berry announcing medical news like a raffle but at Holness beside him, face perfectly still, because the joke only works if somebody on screen believes the scene is good, and Dagless believes it completely. The same knowledge of the genre, turned the right way up, is what he has been using since. When he revived Marenghi for a run of books from 2022, he told an interviewer, "I'm not interested in doing comedy." We believe him about as far as anyone can believe a man who has just brought Garth Marenghi back.
Biography
Matthew Holness is a British comedian, actor, writer and director. He created the fictional horror author Garth Marenghi and starred as the character, also playing Dr Rick Dagless M.D., in the 2004 Channel 4 series Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which he co-wrote with Richard Ayoade.
Born in Whitstable, Kent, Holness read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was vice-president of the Cambridge Footlights. His contemporaries included David Mitchell, Robert Webb and Richard Ayoade. He first appeared on television in the 2000 BBC series Bruiser and won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe for the stage show Garth Marenghi's Fright Knight.
Holness has appeared in The Office (2002) as Simon, Cemetery Junction (2010), Life's Too Short (2011), Toast of London (2013) and Friday Night Dinner (2011). He wrote and directed the 2018 feature film Possum and has published books under the Garth Marenghi name.
