From Garth Marenghi to The Mighty Boosh, Paddington’s blockbuster success stands on a TV comedy golden age and the early work of Paul King.
“The very gates of Hell” might not be the first place you’d look to find Paddington’s origin story. But with Paul King as director and future ursine-alumni Alice Lowe and Richard Ayoade on the stage, the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe run of Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight proved not to be a half-bad training ground for the man behind the most successful comedy franchise of the last decade.
Pitched as a gory and melodramatic spoof of Stephen King-style scares, the show centred around Matthew Holness’ fictional horror author, Marenghi, and his inspired telling of another writer’s fight to rescue his muse from the forces of darkness. Fright Knight was nominated for a Perrier award. The follow-up, 2001’s Netherhead, won one. TV beckoned, and soon King, Holness, Ayoade and Lowe were catapulted onto Channel 4’s late-night slot and left to fend for themselves. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, a ‘lost’ 80s TV drama coincidentally only ever originally broadcast in Peru, would garner a cult following among horror and comedy geeks on DVD, but it was too late. Channel 4 cancelled the show after its first series, and that was that.
But the early 2000s was a prolific era for ground-breaking TV comedy. Sketch shows like The League Of Gentlemen, Bruiser, Little Britain, Big Train, Jam and Smack The Pony rubbed shoulders with Green Wing, Black Books, Spaced and Peep Show across the BBC and Channel 4. Sketch and loosely-narrative comedy, honed in fringe theatres and the backrooms of pubs, was experiencing another golden age – one which would prove an astonishingly effective breeding ground for more mainstream talent later on.
King – who served as associate director on Darkplace, with Ayoade directing – of all the Garth Marenghi group seemed to stay closest to the show’s melodramatic brand of off-kilter silliness. Brought in to direct The Mighty Boosh (Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt’s surreal semi-musical comedy troupe) after getting to know the pair from their alternative comedy night above a North London pub, the show moved King’s dial in a slightly less traumatising direction – but not by much. If nothing else, the show’s penchant for extravagant musical numbers would prove a useful training camp for Wonka…
If there is one parallel to be drawn between Darkplace, Boosh and Paddington, however, it’s in their volume of ideas, rather than their content. As far as tone and world-building go, both Garth Marenghi and Boosh have a manic, gag-heavy energy completely at odds with the often-deadpan delivery of their actors. You can’t accuse either of lacking creativity – the ‘anything goes’ mentality that defines much of the alternative comedy scene leaps out of the TV in the same way whimsical contraptions and absurd characters do in what we can now refer to as ‘The Paddington Trilogy’.
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Heading further into the mainstream, too, King went on to direct all six episodes of Matt Lucas and David Walliams’ airport-set follow-up to Little Britain, Come Fly With Me. Despite aging less gracefully than his more theatrical offerings (Netflix removed the show from its service in 2020 over its use of blackface, brownface and yellowface), the sketch show sensibility is one that never seems far from the surface in the best of British comedy on the big screen.
Because though King’s work across Paddington and Wonka in many ways stands alone in an era devoid of comedy in the cinema, the route to get there feels more common-sense than his alternative beginnings would suggest. From the late-90s to the mid-2000s, dozens of creative types were plucked from Fringe theatre and given the freedom to make more-or-less whatever they wanted, launching the careers of everyone from Edgar Wright to Noel Fielding. Now, as Paddington In Peru (for which King shares a story credit with fellow sketch-alumnus Simon Farnaby) prepares to blow the socks off the UK box office, that era of experimentation once again might be bearing fruit.
Paddington In Peru is in UK cinemas now.
