Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3698 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-04-23
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 173 minutes

DVD Description
Under the streets of London is a strange world inhabited by monsters and saints, muderers and angels, knights in armour and pale girls in black velvet. Richard, a quiet London businessman, is pitchforked into this world when he rescues a young girl he finds bleeding on a pavement. Neverwhere is a dark and thrilling mixture of metaphor, history, humour and high adventure. Starring Laura Fraser (The Flying Scotsman), Hywel Bennett (Loot, Eastenders), Gary Bakewell (Man and Boy).

Synopsis
Get lost under the London streets with this six-part fantasy adventure written for television by the prolific fantasy author Neil Gaiman. Richard Mayhew is a businessman whose whole life is about to change when he comes across a girl by the name of Door...

Customer Reviews

Flawed, but some good elements overcome them.
Back in the mid-1990s, Neil Gaiman and British comedian and producer Lenny Henry decided to team up to work on a project for television. Having already conquered the comic book market with Sandman and produced a bestselling novel (Good Omens, with Terry Pratchett), TV was the natural next medium for Gaiman to move into. Henry had come up with the basic idea of 'tribes' of homeless people living in London, but Gaiman carefully refined the idea so as not to make the idea of living rough in London as 'cool' and brought a heavier element of the fantastical into play. The end result was the BBC mini-series Neverwhere, which aired on BBC-2 in late 1996.

Neverwhere had a somewhat troubled production. Gaiman had deliberately set the story in London with locations all in easy reach of the BBC studios on the reasoning that they could then use more of the budget for things like effects. In fact, this seems to have encouraged the BBC to simply assign a very low budget to the production. In fact, things were so tight they couldn't even film the series on 35mm, instead producing the series on video with plans to 'filmise' it later. They then couldn't afford to do this. To make matters worse, the sets and scenes had been lighted for film, meaning that many scenes look somewhat overlit and garish on video. This was a huge mistake for the BBC, who had been banking on Gaiman's popularity in the USA to help sell the show, but no US station would touch a series filmed on video with a barge pole. Another problem is the music: the haunting main title theme by Brian Eno is only heard over the end credits, whilst the atmospheric introduction (by long-time Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean) is only accompanied by some ambient sound effects. It doesn't work. Neither do the self-consciously odd 'story so far' sections at the start of each episode. And the least said of the Beast of London sequence, the better.

Another problem is that much of the cast was relatively young and inexperienced. Whilst Laura Fraser (Door) has gone on to become a fixture of British cinema and television over the past decade, this was only her third TV part and having to do things like talk to rats and assign dangerous missions to pigeons was obviously not where her talents lay. In other scenes, though, she nails the naive otherworldliness of the part just right. Gary Bakewell is simply not right for the central part of Richard Mayhew. He gets the out-of-his-depth stuff just right but a lot of the time comes across as passive and confused. Part of this is a problem with the character - the later novel version suffers from it as well - but Bakewell's performance does little to enliven things. The series' big find was Paterson Joseph, who gives a splendidly theatrical performance as the Marquis de Carabas, which is appropriate for the role. He perhaps goes a little broad at times, but he steals every scene he's in and his later turn to the dark side (after an encounter with the villains) is very well-played. It falls to the more experienced actors to show the young 'uns how it's done: Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell give deliciously evil performances as Croup and Vandemar, whilst Trevor Peacock's batty Old Bailey and Freddie Jones as the Earl are well-played.

There are issues with the script as well. After spending ten years writing comics for DC, you'd expect Gaiman to be a dab hand as a writer, but his script feels clumsy and obvious in some places. In other areas the script shines, with the very careful positioning and timing of events in the first part of the story setting up events later on quite nicely.

So, some dodgy acting, some dubious writing problems, some bad music and restricted production values. Does the series get anything right? Certainly. The central storyline remains compelling and the whole notion and idea of London Below (which was so great that China Mieville borrowed from it twice, for his novels King Rat and Un Lun Dun) is superb.

How much you enjoy Neverwhere (***) depends on whether you can overcome its numerous shortcomings to appreciate the story. If you can do that, there is much here to enjoy (for this reason, fans of old-school Doctor Who may enjoy it more than most). The complete series is available on DVD in the UK and USA. Gaiman adapted the series as a novel, which restores some ideas cut from the TV version, whilst a less-successful comic book version (adapted by others) followed a decade later. A movie version has been mooted for some time, with rumours of renewed interest following the success of the most recent Gaiman adaption, Stardust. Gaiman himself has occasionally spoken about a sequel to the story, most likely in novel form, but nothing has come of it so far.

Urban fantasy
I have to admit that I missed Neverwhere when it was on telly. The opening with the talking head of Gary Bakewell as Richard Mayhew and the performance of the actress who plays Jessica, his girlfriend, felt a bit painful to watch. I did pick up the novel though and enjoyed that thoroughly. And yes, i've read Good Omens and Sandman since then, although I'm not sold on Sandman being the masterpiece everyone says it is, so I thought I'd give the TV show another go.

And it's not half bad. Yes, Bakewell is still only half-baked as the viewpoint character but he doesn't have much to do but act outraged and confused (except that he doesn't do confused much and the outraged side wears a bit thin). When he does reach a bit further into the acting box he's okay. And the girlfriend is still cardboard awful but the rest of the actors are great. Lovely lovely Laura Fraser plays the nicely grounded Door, Joseph Patterson is faboo as the Marquis and Peter Capaldi is a nicely serene Angel Islington.

As Neil Gaiman comments in an interview extra on the DVD, it is by turns funny, adventurous, sad (although Gaiman also mentions scary, which I don't think it ever manages) and shocking at points, even to someone who knew the story going in. That said, it's not particularly deep and not really layered but it's still a good adventure/fantasy/horror story.

The plot? Richard Mayhew helps an injured girl on the street. She is Door, from a contemporaneous fantastic version of London called London Below a world built on puns on London placenames, so that Earl's Court is the travelling court of an Earl, there really is an Angel called Islington, etc. Door's family has been murdered by Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar who work for a mysterious employer and they are hunting for Door. Richard finds he can no longer be seen by people in London Above (or our world) and has to follow Door to get answers.

The design and effects are pretty good. The design makes me think of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although obviously this predates that (or was in production at the same time). The director is clever enough to pull away when the budget will not allow the appropriate effect so that you fill in a lot in your head, but given that most of us grew up on budget British TV you should be used to that. It is intriguing to think what they might be able to do with computers today, but it's still quite good. Unfortunately the lighting is the hard light of British TV in the old days, too, so the atmosphere is never quite as claustrophobic as you'd hope.

And yet, despite the faults it's still rather good and you can see that they were hoping to continue to other series with some loose ends at the end of the story and it's rather sad they weren't able to, because I think it would have been rather cool. So if you are a fan of telefantasy or Neil Gaiman give it a shot, it's a lovely piece of work.

A bit flat, but entertaining nonetheless
It was fun to watch, though after having read the book, it wasn't much of a surprise. I didn't find it dark enough - there was so much light in London below - somehow I had imagined it a lot darker and wetter. I thought the acting was quite good, and the characters were generally well cast. I thought Door could have been a bit more interesting as a character - she certainly seemed that way from the book.