Neil Gaiman Donal O’Donoghue talks to the fantasy writer and creator of Good Omens, a major new TV series about angels and demons
Good Omens is a tale of angels and demons, of right and wrong, with Jon Hamm as the archangel Gabriel. Donal O’Donoghue gets the story from creator Neil Gaiman
The omens were not good. There we were, stacked up on a staircase, waiting to meet the cast of Amazon Prime’s most hyped show to date, Good Omens. The six-part series, adapted by author Neil Gaiman from the cult 1990 novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett, has over 240 speaking parts, more than one thousand special effects and a starry cast that includes Frances McDormand as the Voice of God and Benedict Cumberbatch as the Voice of Satan. As we waited, a door opened and out trooped David Tennant, Michael Sheen, Jon Hamm and Miranda Richardson, bound for the lower depths of the building where the TV crews awaited. In the room behind them, left to hold the fort as it were, was showrunner, Neil Gaiman and director Douglas Mackinnon. I’d like to think we got the better deal.
Good Omens is about the End of Days.
Or rather the adventures of an angel called Aziraphale (Sheen) and his demon friend Crowley (Tennant) who team up to prevent the apocalypse. For years a number of bright sparks, including Terry Gilliam, tried and failed to corral this wild and woolly fantasy for the screen. In the summer of 2014, Pratchett, long diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, wrote to Gaiman asking him to make a screen version for him to watch before “the lights went out”. Within nine months Pratchett was dead but Gaiman, inspired
by his friend’s “last request” spent 18 months “reinventing the novel as television”. And late last year, at a razzmatazz launch in London, we sat in the dark watching Michael Sheen in heavenly white and David Tennant in demonic black making their play to save the planet.
“( Good Omens) is a book about friendship,” says Neil Gaiman, whose American Gods (Amazon Prime) and Lucifer (Fox and now Netflix) have also been re-imagined for the small screen. “In particular the friendship between an angel and a demon, Crowley and Aziraphale, who have been on earth for millennia and are now determined to avert the apocalypse because they really like being on earth and anyway there aren’t any really nice restaurants in hell or heaven. It’s also just about people muddling through life and the idea that avoiding war might be actually better than going to war. Sometimes adventures are best avoided even if all of that is set in the context of the most lunatic adventure you could ever run into.”
Some of the time-bending escapades in the TV series were not in the original book. “Those extra things were stolen from plans that Terry and I had for a sequel that we never did as well as a film script we planned,” says Gaiman. “Over the years we had many conversations about heaven and hell and had figured out our angels and demons. But some of my favourite bits in the TV series are completely new, and they exist because I broke down the novel into six chunks. I decided for example that in episode three, I’d do a mini movie about Aziraphale and Crowley, where you get to see them starting out as enemies and follow them through places like Ancient Rome, Shakespearean times, the Swinging Sixties and so on. At one point they talk about meeting for dinner in the French Revolution so I had to do the French Revolution.”
Gaiman was central to casting Sheen and Tennant. “I had known Michael for ages and knew that Good Omens was one of his favourite books,” he says. “So I sent him the scripts and we met for dinner. Over dinner Michael said ‘I don’t think I’d be a good fit for Crowley’ and I said to him ‘But I want you as Aziraphale’. I told him that I loved the goodness in him and that’s what Aziraphale was all about. With David I remember I was halfway through writing episode three and suddenly I had an idea for a scene that involved physical comedy. And I just suddenly thought David Tennant could do that. From that moment the way I wrote Crowley changed and I was absolutely determined that David would be my Crowley.”
As he toiled on the adaptation, Terry Pratchett was the angel at Gaiman’s shoulder. “The joy of writing Good Omens together was that we had a very small audience,” says Gaiman. “My audience was Terry, his audience was me. So when either one of us would do something clever we’d ring the other one up and say ‘You’re going to like this.’ On the TV series I remember cracking the shape of episode six, something I’d been working on for months because I knew that if I didn’t crack that the plot would come to a halt halfway through and it would just be people saying their goodbyes for half an hour. In that one moment I missed Terry more than anything.”
Gaiman not only wrote the scripts but was also the series’ showrunner, a position that was non-negotiable. “I wrote two episodes of Doctor Who over the last decade. One I loved and it won awards; one I did not love and is widely regarded as a curate’s egg. As far as I’m concerned both of the scripts were of equal quality. The biggest difference was having a say in what actually got to be on screen. If I was going to do Good Omens I would have to be a showrunner because I can’t just write the scripts and hand them over to somebody and hope for the best. If this is going to be f**ked up, it’s going to be f**ked up by me.”
It wasn’t. Good Omens the TV series is a riot, by turn whimsical, madcap and thrillingly epic yet also totally topical. “When we wrote the novel it was just after the Berlin Wall came down and the era of glasnost,” says Neil Gaiman. “So we had this story about Armageddon and had to do a lot of pushing to make it seem even vaguely credible. Now it feels astonishingly timely. I believe we’ve made a show that a smart 12-year-old will enjoy just as much as a smart 37-year-old or a smart 90-year-old.” Somewhere too, I imagine, his old friend Terry Pratchett looks on, smiling.