Matt Holness is a little confused by how clueless he is. He finds most TV shows embarrassing, doesn’t host podcasts, and is surprised that anyone in the British comedy scene remembers him. He left a long time ago.
“I don’t know who is doing what, I don’t know who is who, I’m trapped in my own world and that’s why I’m so sorry. I have no idea.”
It’s a little surprising considering how many comedians working today worship him. Holness is the man at the dark heart of the 2004 Channel 4 sleepover hit. The Dark Place of Garth Marenga and he played Simon, the snotty IT guy The Bureau, but also in other works by Ricky Gervais and Armando Iannucci. He started the 2000s as a Perrier Award winner, one of the brightest young minds in British comedy. After all, he ran away from comedy altogether.
However, he has now returned. Garth Marenga’s Tome of Horrors this is the first appearance of his character hack-horror writer Marenga in more than a decade, with three new terrifying, masterfully written stories about not Garth Marenga, horror writer Nick Steen, a man on a mission to save humanity. ”) from forces that threaten to “overshadow our world with more evil.” We’re talking about a week for a month-long nationwide character reading tour.
“I was worried about bringing back the Garth character,” Holness says from his home near Norwich. “But writing the book helped me get back into the zone.”
The Dark Place of Garth Marenga was perhaps the most iconic comedy of recent decades. It is said to have been a long-forgotten horror television show written, directed and played by the titular, impossibly pompous Marenghi – “an author, dream weaver, visionary, plus actor” as he put it – one who emerged from the Darkness. during “the worst artistic drought in broadcast history”.
Marenghi reportedly created a hybrid anthology horror show and medical drama set in Romford Hospital, which turns out to be built over the Hell Mouth. Sloppily written, amateurishly acted, insanely planned and made with the worst shoelaces. dark place was previously acorn antique if it had been done by Chiller’s audacious writer. “I know writers who use subtext,” Marenghi once says. And they are all cowards.
dark place was the first television appearance of an entire generation of British comedic talent. Richard Ayoade played Dean Lerner, Marenga’s ruthless and elegant agent; Matt Berry played actor Todd Rivers and Alice Lowe was Madeleine Wool, who sadly disappeared somewhere in Eastern Europe before the show was reopened. her friends Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt Mighty evil also showed up.
In 2004 dark place went almost without notice. But the DVDs were distributed in college dorms and to groups of friends—comedian Ed Gamble even bought a pirated copy on eBay before the rewatch was officially released—and the legend grew. While the stars were traveling on comedy dark place re-discovered over and over again, this perfect one-of-a-kind that didn’t look like anything before and hasn’t looked like anything since. Comedian Nish Kumar named it the Velvet Underground for millennial comedians.
That’s because it’s like an almost bottomless well of comedy. Sort of distance from each other and Chris Morris brass eye, dark place used the mechanics of television and film as part of a joke. Weird things are happening all over the place: wobbly timing, sound effects that don’t quite fit in with the action, amateurish editing, and fundamental continuity errors. “New” interviews with the surviving cast are added between scenes. “She was like a candle in the wind,” student Ayoade recalls of the missing Madeleine Vul. “Unreliable”.
Holness, now 47, grew up happy and safe with his parents and brother in Whitstable. Yet horror seemed omnipresent: he was smitten by bleak news programs and educational films that warned children that they could be electrocuted on high-voltage lines and that they could drown in quarries, and he was fascinated by what Marenghi would call ” fantastic.” “.
He devoured horror novels “to the point where my parents actually got a call asking if everything was okay”; He jumps up from his chair to show a copy of the illustrated guide to the supernatural that first captured his imagination. When he passed 11+, his award was Peter Cushing’s autobiography. One day he saw Cushing in a bookstore and asked for an autograph (he was cute but hated when eight and ten year old boys watched his films).
After school, Holness went to Trinity College, Cambridge to study English literature. He arrived in 1993 with the intention of joining the university’s Footlights acting club.
“I remember thinking that David Mitchell would probably be in Rainbow because he was in panto and he was a favorite of those waiting for Rainbow.
Holness went to Mitchell’s dorm at Peterhouse College, “knocked on his door, introduced me and said, ‘I think you’re going to Footlight next year, I’d love to come too – we should do a show together.’ And he said, “Well, it’s funny you say that, Matt, because I literally agreed to do the show with Robert Webb.” I am so sorry.'”
Heartbroken, he continued. “There was a point in my life when I found physical grunts funny, I thought I was the new guy. [comic and rubber-faced impressionist] Phil Cool.
When the Footlights committee stopped to check, “they sort of derisively retired.”
Getting to the end of Marenga’s early draft was “one of the greatest feelings in the world” for me. Holness wore his grandfather’s old glasses and turned to his favorite writers. “It was the first thing I did at Footlights and got a good response,” says Holness.
Ayoade and Lowe also joined them and in 2000 the three of them and the future Paddington Director Paul King took Dread Knight Garth Marenga at the Edinburgh Fringe, where he was nominated for a Perrier Award. In its 2001 follow-up Void of Garth Marengawon.
On TV dark place came out late at night and the ratings were low. Channel 4 rejected the proposal for a second season as too complicated and instead asked for a studio sitcom. Ayoade and Holness wanted to play a trick on Hugh Burnett. Face to face The interview is from the 1960s, but the radio station insisted on a live audience.
when he arrived Man to Man with Dean Lerner landed awkwardly, made no parody, no mainstream crossover. Looking at him now, you can almost feel Holness and Ayoade’s unease about their characters being forced to turn their ideas into something more enjoyable. The frustrated teams dispersed. “That’s when I lost interest in comedy,” Holness says. His last appearance as Marenga was in 2008.
Holness instead explored full-blown horror in short films, releasing a deeply disturbing and gritty feature film in 2018. opossum. It’s a psychological horror film about a disgraced child actor, inspired in part by Jimmy Savile and the psychological damage his crimes did to the generation that trusted him. It is advisable to look once, admire and never look again.
“When I pick up my daughter from school and one of the parents says, ‘I see your film on Prime, we’ll watch it,’ I’m basically saying please don’t do this,” says Holness. Because you won’t like me.
During the video, this darkness of the soul seems strikingly absent. Holness is light company, reserved and unflappable, free of the “I have other-things-you-know-what” jokes that some manufacturers of very popular things fall into, and in general every inch of dad in middle life. .
Write Tome of HorrorsHolness quickly realized that Marenghi was known for bad prose (“He examined his sleeve. Blood!? Blood. Scarlet blood that smelled of copper, his blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. And a little sick”) while working on stage. this should be fixed a bit for the casual reader. “I really wanted to make sure I was writing stories that were readable, even if they were badly written,” he explains.
Steen battles the forces of darkness, his annoying editor, and his own ego. “Despite my fame, I knew I couldn’t claim tax on old antiques (I tried several times to no avail),” he muses as he buys a used typewriter. In the end, he decides to stop paying child support to his ex-wife and sell most of his daughter’s toys.
Enough time had passed since Holness had been burned by the TV industry to greet Marenghi lovingly—he liked to put on Marenghi’s leather jacket again. But it wasn’t revived as a springboard back to comedy.
“I wasn’t interested in comedy, and to be honest, I still am. That’s not why I did it. I felt like I had to write a book to be in charge again. I am writing something that was not passed through a television meat grinder. He smiles. “If it’s not as pompous and arrogant as Garth.”
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.