Good Omens for Pratchett’s legacy
Neil Gaiman talks to Catherine Nixey about modern love and fulfilling Terry Pratchett’s last request to him.
Neil Gaiman was feeling pleased. It was 2005 and Hollywood had called. A leading director was interested in buying Anansi Boys, Gaiman’s bestselling, prizewinning novel based on African folklore.
Gaiman had written it for his friend Lenny Henry because Henry had complained that ‘‘there are no black protagonists in our horror movies’’.
And now here was this director keen to buy it.
You can imagine Gaiman’s excitement. The conversation continued, and at some point the director said: ‘‘And of course we’ll make all the characters white.’’ Gaiman didn’t sell it. No matter. Gaiman would hardly miss a Hollywood adaptation as he is having something of a moment.
An adaptation of his 2001 novel American Gods was one of the big series of 2017. The BBC, with Amazon, is making an adaptation of Good Omens, his and the late Terry Pratchett’s book about Satan, to be broadcast in 2019, starring Michael Sheen and David Tennant.
The composer Mark-Anthony Turnage has adapted Gaiman’s Coraline into an opera, to be presented by the British Royal Opera in March. Anansi Boys has been made into a six-part radio serial.
I meet Gaiman on the set of Good Omens, which is being filmed at a freezing airfield in Hemel Hempstead, an hour’s drive northwest of London. You sense that this location would please Pratchett: if Pratchett’s Satan were to turn up anywhere it would be Hemel Hempstead.
Outside, characters in summer clothes wander through the snow shivering and pretending it is August. Gaiman invites me into the set’s bookshop. It is cold too. It has been created to perfectly match the specifications of the book and Gaiman’s script, and it is sumptuous – the sort of place that demands the use of the words ‘‘red Morocco’’ to describe its collection. There are, needless to say, armchairs (winged) and rugs (Turkish). Gaiman is not, you suspect, the sort of man to buy his books in Tesco.
The genre of fantasy has undergone something of a revolution. It used to belong to that category of things that people would do, but deny. Gaiman was frequently told in Hollywood that ‘‘nobody understands or watches fantasy’’. He’d reply by listing fantasy blockbusters, ‘‘and they’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah, but Lord of the Rings doesn’t count’.’’
The BBC was ‘‘pretty nervous’’ about doing its first Gaiman adaptation, Neverwhere, a few years ago. Now, post-Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, fantasy has come out of the closet. When Gaiman finished Anansi Boys for the British station, Radio 4, the station’s controller sent him ‘‘a lovely letter’’ telling him how much she enjoyed his shows. Once, hearing that the controller of Radio 4 liked fantasy would have felt akin to learning that your maiden aunt enjoyed death metal. Now it feels fine. Gaiman is acting as showrunner (Hollywood-speak for top banana) on Good Omens .He hasn’t wholly taken to his new role. ‘‘It was Terry’s fault,’’ he says. ‘‘I should be off writing novels.’’
He and Pratchett had always wanted to watch it on screen, but ‘‘neither of us wanted to make it. We wanted somebody else to make it and for us to just sort of look clever.’’
They had delightedly planned a scene in a sushi restaurant (their favourite food) in which they would sit as extras and eat sushi. For years they had looked for screenwriters, but no-one was quite right. Then, after his Alzheimer’s started to get worse, ‘‘Terry reached out to me and wrote me a letter. He said, ‘Nobody else cares for the old girl like you and I do. And I have never asked you to do anything before and we’ve been friends for 35 years. Please write this so I can see it before the darkness’.’’ It was, Gaiman says, his breath misting in the air of the freezing bookshop, ‘‘a last request, I guess’’. So he said OK.
Gaiman has been working on it for 18 months and it will go on for most of next year. People ask him what he’s going to showrun next, and he says: ‘‘Nothing. I’m going to become a retired showrunner.’’
It is, he says, ‘‘the absolute opposite of being a novelist’’. You have to get up ‘‘ridiculously early’’ and deal with budgets and office politics.
He is looking forward to going back to writing books: in part because ‘‘you get up whenever you want’’. Radio seems to appeal to him more as a medium. For one thing, the special effects are cheaper. For another, it’s faster. In film-making you crawl through the script at the rate of a page a day. ‘‘It’s the magic of radio,’’ he says.
‘‘You just get it done.’’ After Gaiman told the Hollywood director (who he refuses to name ‘‘because they are famous still and perhaps they have learnt better’’) that what he had said was ‘‘stupid and offensive’’ and that he wasn’t going to sell him his book, Anansi Boys was taken up by Radio 4. They didn’t make it all white. Indeed at the read-through, which Gaiman describes as ‘‘glorious’’, only one of the actors, Julian Rhind-Tutt, of the 20-odd cast wasn’t black.
One of the other actors went up to him and said: ‘‘Well, now you know how we normally feel.’’
Anansi Boys is a bit about the African folk character Anansi, who spins stories, and quite a lot about how embarrassing parents are. Gaiman has four children – three from his first marriage and one from his marriage to Dresden Dolls singer, Amanda Palmer.
‘‘I have had an embarrassing father and I have been an embarrassing father,’’ he says. ‘‘The embarrassingness of fatherhood is simply inbuilt into the condition of father.’’
Embarrassment in the Gaiman line seems to centre on clothing. Gaiman’s siblings cringed at their father’s bright yellow shoes. For his youngest daughter it was the pyjama onesie that he drove her to school in. The day he got out of the car and displayed it was, for her, ‘‘the single most mortifying thing that had ever happened to anybody’’.
Onesies aren’t his only unconventional act. His marriage to Palmer was, initially, ‘‘a very open relationship’’. They have a 2-year-old son. So while it is ‘‘a theoretically open relationship, it’s kind of closed in practice. Because neither of us is going to sleep with other people when we’ve got a 2-year-old with us, and neither of us is going to sleep with other people when the other can’t because they’ve got a 2-year-old with them.
‘‘There is a fairness to relationships. At some point maybe it will open up again. Right now it’s kind of moot,’’ he says, given that they are ‘‘sharing a bedroom with a 2-year-old who’s just figured out how to get out of his crib. So that is the answer to that. It’s boring and human, I’m afraid.’’
Behind Gaiman, in the bookshop, Michael Sheen wanders past in fawn corduroy and a puff of grey hair like smoke. In the bookshop is a hatstand on which something black hangs. Gaiman points to it. ‘‘Terry’s hat and scarf.’’
After Pratchett died in 2015 Gaiman said his job ‘‘is to ensure the world speaks his name’’. And he has. Constantly, whatever the cost. The work Gaiman is doing on Good Omens will cost him a yearand-a-half in writing time (that’s two novels, says Gaiman, who measures out his life in pages), but for him, it is worth it. Does he see it as a tribute to him? Nothing so mawkish.
‘‘I don’t go into each day thinking, ‘Ah, a tribute to Terry Pratchett.’ I go in thinking, ‘Got to make a film, let’s get it done’.’’
A few days before I arrive they are filming the scene in the sushi restaurant. It was just as Pratchett would have wanted. Better. Fantasy is niche no more and this adaptation has attracted some of the biggest names in television. ‘‘Four nights ago I got to be in a sushi restaurant with Jon Hamm and Michael Sheen acting away,’’ Gaiman says.
And Gaiman couldn’t bring himself to be the extra he and Pratchett had dreamed he would be. ‘‘I couldn’t do it on my own. I would just sit there and cry. Ninety-five per cent of the time I’m just making this thing. And then there is that little five per cent of the time, like the sushi restaurant, where... it destroyed me.’’
‘‘After his Alzheimer’s got worse, Terry wrote to me: ’Nobody else cares for the old girl like you and I do. We’ve been friends for 35 years. Please write this so I can see it before the darkness’.’’
Neil Gaiman