Almost since television began there have been people using the medium to spoof it. No area of the entertainment landscape, from chat shows to documentaries and cop shows to period drama, is safe from the spoof treatment.
But what are the best spoofs? We’ve selected five of our favourites, but let us know which ones you love in the comments below …
1. The Mrs Merton Show (1995-98, BBC iPlayer)
In a career of highs, Caroline Aherne’s performance as the spoof chat-show host Mrs Merton was probably her finest. It was a vehicle for her to be rude to famous people. Hiding behind the seemingly innocent persona of a bespectacled granny in a Crimplene dress, she gave her guests, who included a visibly furious Chris Eubank and Debbie McGee (“So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”), “a warm and gentle kicking”. The Mrs Merton Show ran for four series and invented a genre that inspired Steve Coogan’s I’m Alan Partridge and Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter ego Ali G.
2. Look Around You (2002-05, BBC iPlayer)
Robert “Friday Night Dinner” Popper and Peter Serafinowicz devised, wrote and starred in this exquisite parody of the Open University, Tomorrow’s World and 1970s BBC schools programming. It is criminally underrated, perhaps because the episodes are just shy of ten minutes long. But don’t be fooled, there are more ideas in those ten minutes than you’ll find in entire series of other comedies. It has become cult viewing, with its fans including the South Park creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening. Watch out for cameos from Olivia Colman, Simon Pegg, David Mitchell and Harry Enfield.
3. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (2004, Channel 4)
In this inspired spoof of 1980s horror movies, Matthew Holness plays the author Garth Marenghi, who claims to have made a series for TV in the 1980s that was “so radical, so risky, so dangerous and so crazy” that the powers that be decided to shelve it. Yet in 2004 — the joke continues — because of the “worst artistic drought in broadcast history”, the programmes were remastered for transmission. Richard Ayoade, who created the series with Holness, plays Marenghi’s agent/publisher, while the series also stars Matt Berry and Alice Lowe.
Advertisement
4. Hunderby (2012-15, Sky/Now)
The writer Julia Davis described Hunderby as a comedy period drama rather than a satire, but it is best seen as a spoof. It’s an inspired, extended sketch show composed of every cliché and minutely observed detail from a thousand adaptations of Austen, Brontë and Du Maurier to which is added a bracing dose of Davis’s pitch-black humour. The plot lifts its premise from the novel Rebecca by Du Maurier: a young, shipwrecked girl (Alexandra Roach) is taken in by a pastor, whom she marries only to find that he and his housekeeper (Davis) are obsessed with his first wife.
5. A Touch of Cloth (2012-14, Sky/Now)
Charlie Brooker’s brilliant Airplane!-style detective satire lampoons the cop show, skewering all the clichés of the genre with a mixture of lethal observation and riotous slapstick. Brooker and his writing team (Jason Hazeley, Joel Morris and Ben Caudell) deliver a high joke count in a script that includes a plethora of sight gags. Playing the cop duo Cloth and Oldman, John Hannah and Suranne Jones keep straight faces in the most extraordinary circumstances
Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix, the best Prime Video TV shows, the best Disney+ shows , the best Apple TV+ shows, the best shows on BBC iPlayer , the best shows on Sky and Now, the best shows on ITVX, the best shows on Channel 4 streaming, the best shows on Paramount+ and our favourite hidden gem TV shows. Don’t forget to check our critics’ choices to what to watch this week, the best shows of 2024 so far and browse our comprehensive TV guide.
