Garth Marenghi is a British horror writer (author of such genre classics as Stump, Crab! and The Dank) who, back in the 1980s, created a lost masterpiece of television terror with the series Darkplace. Well, in fact that’s the entirely fictitious premise of Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness’s Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, a spoof concerning a self-important writer of pulp horror (he prefers to be called a ‘dreamweaver’ or ‘fabulist’) and the terrible show he once made (and starred in) for Channel 4.

Each instalment features an introduction by the present-day Marenghi – played by Holness as some sort of unholy amalgam of James Herbert, Shaun Hutson and Guy N Smith – in which he ponders the brilliance of his creation, followed by an ‘original’ episode of Darkplace, a shoddily written and woodenly acted extravaganza of bad special effects and horror clichés.

Admittedly, this is a bit of a one-trick pony in which the joke can wear a little thin, but the characters of Marenghi and his producer Dean Learner are hilarious, and the sending-up of the literary pretensions of horror writers is spot on. It’s no masterpiece, but extremely likeable all the same.