Over the past three weeks, I’ve become a fan of “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace,” a British TV series from 2003 or 2004 which I understand ran on SciFi at one point and which is now airing late Sunday night / early Monday morning on Cartoon Network as part of its “Adult Swim” lineup. You can also find it on YouTube — I have the first part of the first episode at the bottom of this post, after the jump.

This is a show almost impossible to describe. It’s actually sort of a show-within-a-show. In the meta-show, horror novelist Garth Marenghi (Matthew Holness) created “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace” in the 1980s but was unable to get it on the air. Now, desperate for programming, the networks have begun airing it — interspersed with commentary from modern-day Marenghi and his publisher/co-star Dean Lerner (Richard Ayoade), in which they “remember” making the show way back when and comment on it. Marenghi’s physical appearance is obviously supposed to look like Stephen King. The show-within-a-show features Marenghi as Dr. Rick Dagless, a tempestuous surgeon working at a hospital with more than it’s share of supernatural goings-on.

So Holness plays Marenghi playing Dagless. See what I mean about it being hard to describe?

Anyway, the show is a hysterical parody of bad acting, in several different flavors. Holness as Marenghi as Dagless chews the scenery, while Ayoade as Lerner as hospital administrator Thornton Reed is completely wooden and emotionless, apparently reading his lines from cue cards. The premise is that “Lerner” is not an actor — he’s Marenghi’s publisher — but “Marenghi” insisted on casting him anyway. Matt Berry as Todd Rivers as Lucien Sanchez is a slightly different flavor of scenery-chewer, with the additional joke that all of his lines are overdubbed (in a voice somewhere between James Mason and Gregory Peck) and badly lip-synched.

Then there’s Alice Lowe as Madeleine Wool as Liz Asher, a pitiable psychic with hair that’s big even by 1980s standards.

And everything else about the show is intentionally bad. The dialogue is so expository that even Basil Exposition from British Intelligence would laugh at it. In the beginning of the first episode, Lowe/Wool/Asher bends down on her mark to pet a cat — only the cat’s not there yet. While she’s bending down, we see the cat being scooted, even tossed, out of a nearby doorway, and we catch a little glimpse of the hands of the stagehand who is doing the tossing.

It’s all intentionally bad — “stunningly bad,” to quote Dan Aykroyd’s character Leonard Pinth-Garnell from the early days of SNL. It’s also very, very funny.

To find out how funny:

(Warning: contains some strong language)