Today, dear listener, we share with you the very best comedy horror made for television. To achieve this, we employed a dedicated team of statisticians and social media experts, we spoke to all the people who have ever owned a TV set and we cross-referenced the results with every Internet poll since 1927. But we didn’t like the results, so we picked the five that we most enjoyed. That’s proper science for you.
Comedy and horror often go together like eggs and bayonets, or maple syrup and spiders. When people get the idea wrong, it’s really annoying. Dark comedy sometimes means ‘not actually funny’, and comedy-horror at its worst means stupid, lazy rip-offs of other people’s earlier ideas. And there’s only so much self-referential ‘I’m in a film’ and ‘we’ve all watched horror films’, break the fourth wall etc. that we can take, frankly.
Missing from this post are the older, classic series – The Addams Family, the wry bits in some TV horror series and so on. And we left out the existential horror of Mr Ed, where a man’s life is repeatedly questioned by a talking horse. There are limits to our daring.
We judged our selection against three extremely precise criteria:
- Did we actually laugh, even if it was that squirmy laughter which meant it was a bit close to actually scary or insane?
- Did the series draw on, expand on, or effectively parody horror tropes and themes?
- Were the programmes we selected really series, or had we watched TV while drunk again and got confused when flicking channels? (Quincy ME, for example, is not a sequel to Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman, apparently.)
And the five winners are, in negative reverse order of escalating least unimportant irrelevance:
Psychoville (2009-2011)
Both disturbing and funny, this is perhaps dark comedy at its finest, where the description actually delivers. We would include this series merely for the presence of Dawn French, whose performance as a midwife obsessed by a stuffed birthing doll called Freddy is one of her best. Written by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith of League of Gentlemen fame (see below), Psychoville concerns a group of apparent strangers who receive a note which ties all of them to a dark past.
Hard to speak of this one without spoilers – there are many subtle threads – so the best thing you can do is just watch it. There were two series of Psychoville, with a great Halloween Special which links the two full seasons. The special episode can be watched on its own, and is worth it – a sort of tribute to horror portmanteau films from the seventies.
Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place (2004)
This series, on the other hand, is very funny but not exactly scary. It does however include loads of horror/SF tropes and has to have a place. Obsessively seventies in its approach, it’s a fabulous reminder of every ham actor and every creaking plot you’ve ever seen. Set in a hospital facing almost constant paranormal threat (built on a gateway to hell, naturally), Garth Marenghi himself is a self-obsessed writer of schlock horror, introducing the series completely dead-pan. It harks back to the seventies/early eighties heigh-days of The Omen and Shivers, with Slugs and other British horror novels on every book stand with lurid covers.
Created by Matthew Holmes (Marenghi) and Richard Ayoade, it was adapted from their Perrier award winning stage show Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead. Ayoade plays both Marenghi’s agent and, within the show, the hospital administrator Thornton Reed. Add to that terrific performances from Matt Berry and Alice Lowe (as an oddly psychic medic – cue dreadful seventies special effects), the series follows the adventures of those dedicated staff who must protect Darkplace Hospital at all costs. Those costs being mostly to other people.
They’re all good, though Ayoade is particularly marvellous as an actor who can’t act playing an administrator who can’t administrate. Not to be missed.
Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible (2001)
Almost a one man show by Steve Coogan who, like Matthew Holmes above, plays both the character introducing the tales (Dr Terrible) and the lead character in each episode. This is a direct and unashamed tribute to the films of Hammer, Amicus and other companies, hence the title (the film Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, came out in 1965). Guest stars included Honor Blackman, Oliver Tobias, Simon Pegg and Mark Gatiss.
For this single series, the only continuity is Dr Terrible’s peculiar introductions. Episodes skip from classic vampire shenanigans in the Balkans to a Scottish doctor using a dubious serum to regenerate damaged tissue. And Now the Fearing is a lovely piss-take of The Vault of Horror (1973), for example, whilst Frenzy of Tongs is every tale of every inscrutable, evil Oriental Fu Manchu-type ever written (with a touch of Dr Who maybe – Tom Baker’s Talons of Weng Chiang?).
(For more nostalgic nonsense, Hammer Horror and tributes, visit our earlier special feature – spawn of the ripper: the true story)
Death Valley (2011)
A totally different show which may not be so popular a choice, but we loved it. This time the parody turns not on seventies horror themes, but on the vampires, werewolves and zombies which crowd the current market. A simple concept – the San Fernando valley is plagued with monsters, and the LAPD have to manage and contain the situation. The show is presented as a documentary, and is enhanced by the running jokes about disposable sound crew and the difficulties of the filming. The sound boom is almost a character in its own right.
Reminiscent of Reno-911, but the laughs are variously more visceral (and bloody), or more subtle in character development. Caity Lotz is great as the overlooked rookie who is probably more capable than most of them, while the police captain descends into briefings which make often little sense.
The peculiar nature of trying to enforce laws on vampires and werewolves is rather neatly done, as well. As we said, Death Valley has the occasional seriously gory moment, some of which are also rather funny at the same time. The thinking person’s MTV. Sadly again there was only one series. Made by MTV.
League of Gentlemen (1999-2002)
A strange entry, but an essential one. The League of Gentlemen contained, in its three series, some of the darkest elements of folk-horror, and created the unforgettable community of Royston Vasey, set somewhere in the Pennines, the North of England. Which confirms our belief that the North is weird. Written by Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson, the show also stars the first three men in various guises as all the key characters.
We shouldn’t need to bang on about this one, as it’s probably the most widely know of our five picks. It’s very funny, but is also genunely horror-filled, both in the background nuances and in the grotesqueness of some of the characters. Although Edward and Tubs at their ‘local shop’ captured imaginations, we’ll go for Papa Lazarou as our choice.
Played by Reece Shearsmith, Papa Lazarou, the terrifying circus-master, only features three times in the entire series, and yet he leaves behind him an indelible impression. Although he appears as a blacked up clown/ringmaster, that is his real face. He has undisclosed psychic powers, may be unnaturally old, and has been collecting ‘wives’ for decades. His line “You’re my wife now, Dave’” is one of the finest in the show for its undertones of inescapable doom.
The first series is brilliant, the second very good, and the third loses steam a bit. Especially good is the Christmas special, which highlights some of the most bizarre aspects of The League of Gentlemen through the bitter and twisted character of the local vicar Reverend Bernice, who hates Christmas (her mother was carried off by Papa Lazarou disguised as Santa Claus when she was a child).
It’s another portmanteau job, with three tales within a tale. This time you get voodoo, vampirism and a rather neat spoof of Hammer again. Local vet Mr Chinnery confesses that in Victorian times his great-great-grandfather, the finest vet in England, came to Royston Vasey but was tricked into touching a malevolent monkey testicle, as a result of which all succeeding vets in the family have been cursed. Reminiscent of Michael Palin’s Ripping Yarns story The Curse of the Claw, that one.
And that’s it. A choice with which everyone can argue. We shall see you soon…
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