Mind the Gap
Space Time Visualiser: 12th September 1996: Neverwhere
The space time visualise travels back 15 years to the first and only screening of Neverwhere.
I hate to admit it but I think I’m on a loser here. Defending Neverwhere is like trying to talk up Manimal or ‘Celebrity’ Big Brother. The taint of thwarted ambition is surely too much for me to convince anyone that this show was anything but a false errand. In fact, it was a challenge to even find anyone I know who could remember it. This is a shame because, to me, Neverwhere was a show that could and should have been a hit. It was just made at the wrong time.
The 1990s was not a good time to be making a fantasy show in the UK. Even though audiences were lapping up American imports like Star Trek: The Next Generation and the New Adventures of Superman (Lois & Clarke), the prevailing attitude in this country was that Sci-fi and fantasy cost too much money to make properly; and by ‘properly’ I mean – to make it look just like Star Wars.
Not only that, genre television was going through something of an image problem. When SFX contacted Carnival films, the makers of Crime Traveller to offer them a spread in their magazine they were refused point blank; apparently their new show about a time travelling detective ‘wasn’t’ science fiction. That is the conflicting attitude you had to hold in your mind if you wanted to make tele-fantasy in those days. In light of that it’s hard to believe that Neverwhere made it to the screen at all. In 2011 your show can be about anything: superheroes, wizards, the apocalypse and viewers will buy it. They even got us to watch a show about a bisexual immortal being fighting aliens in … Cardiff Bay… as if such a thing was not so completely misconceived as to border on the demented. But back then Neverwhere had no fantasy renaissance to shelter it from the chill winds of mockery. This was a more rigid time when adult drama could only be about cops and docs and where anything else was written off as cheap and silly. I argue that Neverwhere is the missing link of modern Tele-fantasy, the elusive ancestor that bridges the old days with our high-concept present.
Neverwhere began as a conversation between writer Neil Gaiman and comedian Lenny Henry when the latter was seeking ideas for his newly formed Crucial Films production company. Henry wanted to make a show about the plight of London’s homeless, but Gaimen felt the idea to be exploitative if done as a straightforward drama. Thereafter the idea mutated into a fairy tale where the London we know exists concurrently with an underground version inhabited by rat speakers and sewer folk. The main character, Richard, is cast into this nightmare world after making the mistake of helping an injured girl he finds on the street. The next day his bank account disappears, no one at work will talk to him and his fiancé has no memory of him. To get his life back he has to join a quest through the maze of subterranean London below.
The world of London below is based on the iconic tube map and so every stop on the network is transformed into an almost too-literal fantasy. There is an Earl who holds court on the District Line. There are black friars at Blackfriars. Down street really does go down and at the heart of it all is the beatific Angel Islington. If you’re thinking that all this sounds a little too ‘on the nose’ well that’s really the point of it. London below is an exaggerated and twisted counterpart to reality. It is a collage world of fiefdoms and labyrinths and pockets of old time trapped like bubbles in amber. It is an exercise in world building, so much so that you could easily imagine it as a computer game or graphic novel. Even the title sequence, an over-lapping slideshow of spooky images and derelict architecture seeks to induct you into a mind-set of wide–eyed curiosity tinged with foreboding. The pipe organ theme music only heightens the effect.
Things are helped with the addition of a better than usual cast. Patterson Joseph sets up a career of playing sneering arrogant pricks by playing the sneering arrogant prick – the Marquis de Carabas. To picture the Marquis try (briefly in order to remain sane) to imagine Puss in Boots spliced with Shaft. Somehow Joseph keeps the character just the right side of ridiculous and even manages the creditable feat of making him a little frightening. Peter Capaldi turns in a characteristically chilling performance as the Angel Islington. Imagine Malcolm Tucker playing Gabriel in a school nativity and you’ll be halfway there. In fact, every scene gives the actors something interesting to do and so Neverwhere has an infectious enthusiasm about it, as if the cast can’t believe they are being paid to have so much fun. Holding it all together is Gary Bakewell as Richard, a man so wet and woolly that he and his jumper appear to be melding into a single being. It is not often that a character so earnest is played so well and Bakewell deserves all due credit for playing the ultimate straight man.
So why didn’t it work? Well, it is another case of something falling between the floorboards. Neverwhere was hampered by some archaic production values. The 30 minute episodes and the decision to shoot on video instead of film gave the series a cheap feel which made it appear to audiences like an escapee from CBBC rather than an adult drama serial. It gets worse; the episodes were lit and filmed with the intention of filmizing the footage later on. For some reason this was called off at the last minute so the finished product has the look of a deleted scene in a DVD special features package.
I am not recommending this show because it represents a false dawn but rather because it was a foretaste of things to come. Crucial films took a gamble at a time when the best they could expect as a response was indifference and derision. In that sense it’s the Queer as Folk of fantasy TV, something unashamedly different and invigorating. Without people taking risks like this many of the most popular shows of the last decade simply wouldn’t have happened. For that at least it deserves to be remembered.
Mind the gap… please.
