Headscratchers / Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

• Have the in-universe episodes been cut to add the interview footage, or were the final cuts really that short?
  • It's stated in-universe that a lot of slow motion was used as Padding to draw out the length of episodes. Bear in mind that there is precisely one deleted scene from "Scotch Mist" titled on the DVD as "The One Scene I Cut."
  • The DVD bonus interviews state that Dean Leaner had accidentally tossed half of the show into the Thames during a customs raid on his London offices, and the interviews were included to fill in the shows.
• Bit of needless nitpicking here, but why is Dagless always shown as being cheap or very concerned with people paying him back? It's funny for the viewer but doesn't really fit the "Mary Sue" angle.
  • It fits the "Jerk Sue" angle though.
  • Garth Marenghi acts that way in "real life", and since he is writing himself he doesn't see anything wrong with it.
  • It's a sort of Unreliable Narrator based on the "Jerk Sue" angles as discussed above. Marenghi doesn't see himself as a tightfisted SOB, he just thinks he's sensible with money. Ergo, he writes Dagless as 'sensible with money' in the same way he is, not realising that it's actually just tightfistedness. Basically, Marenghi lacks the self-awareness to recognise his own personality flaws for what they are and presents them in his fictional hero as if they are examples of what a cool and clever guy he is, when in fact they clearly demonstrate the opposite.
• How was the in-universe show financed? Each in-universe episode obviously had a very low budget, but they claim they made (at least) 50 of them, but the rest are lost, and apparently budget issues were why the extras are absent in later episodes. One could reconcile this by saying Dean and Garth had a decent amount of money is isolation, but not enough to fund 50 TV episodes, so they just gave each episode a very small budget, and there were originally episodes filmed between the ones the audience sees, but Dean and Garth state in the commentary they really didn't have any money when they started filming.
  • potential WMG - Darkplace was a tax evasion exexercise for Dean Learner. He sets up a production company that he funnels his excess profits in, hires an egoistical but clueless writer who he knows will make a terrible product and sends the results in to Channel 4 knowing full well they won’t pick them up