Garth Marenghi / Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D.

Garth Marenghi is a self-declared visionary of horror fiction who casts himself as Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D., the maverick physician battling supernatural evil at Darkplace Hospital. Introduced via clunky retrospective interviews, he explains his own genius at length while the drama itself keeps derailing into wooden line-readings, dry ice, and evil that seeps up through the basement.

Matthew Holness plays the joke with total sincerity, never winking at the audience even as Marenghi praises his own prose in interview cutaways or Dagless flubs a heroic line. The comedy comes from that unwavering conviction — a man utterly certain he has made a masterpiece, holding a boom mic's shadow and a dodgy wig with the same solemn authority.