More on Neverwhere

Neil Gaiman, left, and Chuck Lorre at the Warner Brothers TV 2013 SXSW party on March 9, 2013 in Austin, Texas. (Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

Neil Gaiman’s book Neverwhere has already been made into a TV series, and now the BBC has turned it into a six-part radio drama, which will begin on Saturday. Even non-Britons can listen to it online.
Gaiman has given himself some small parts. Other actors include James McAvoy, Natalie Dormer, David Harewood, Sophie Okonedo, Christopher Lee (yes, the horror movie Christopher Lee), Anthony Head, David Schofield, Bernard Cribbens, Romola Garai, George Harris, Andrew Sachs, Lucy Cohu, Johnny Vegas, Paul Chequer, Don Gilet,  Abdul Salis.…and the seemingly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch.
He’s done so many films, etc., this year that I’m starting to wonder if he sleeps at all, never mind about things like vacations.
Gaiman knows how popular Cumberbatch is. On his blog he wrote “Here is a photograph of Benedict Cumberbatch. He plays the angel Islington. Many of my friends strongly believe that photographs of Mr Cumberbatch and amusing photographs of kittens were what the internet was created for.”
The BBC has several web pages devoted to the series.
Here are excerpts from one of them, describing the story. “Beneath the streets of London there is another London. A subterranean labyrinth of sewers and abandoned tube stations. A somewhere that is Neverwhere.”
“An act of kindness sees Richard Mayhew (James McAvoy) catapulted from his ordinary life into a subterranean world under the streets of London. Stopping to help an injured girl on a London street, Richard is thrust from his workaday existence into the strange world of London Below. . . (a) subterranean London, far below the streets of London Above. Populated with people who have fallen between the cracks in society, London Below is a mysterious and murky world of shadows and danger. Here there really is an Earl of Earl’s Court, a Baron at Baron’s Court, shepherds at Shepherd’s Bush and an angel. Called Islington. It is also the home of the Great Beast of London, an ancient and terrifying creature dwelling somewhere deep in the Labyrinth, at the very heart of London Below.”
Benedict Cumberbatch plays that angel. As his Sherlock fans would probably say “obviously.”
The play has lines like “We have a damsel to un-distress. . .”
Actress Natalie Dormer plays a young woman named Door. On the BBC site she reveals that Christopher Lee is a Latin scholar and he helped her with her character’s Latin. She also says “I laughed every day until my sides ached and eyes watered.” “I hope you enjoy listening to Neverwhere as much as we enjoyed making it.
“It’s a little bit awesome… ‘the way rats are a little bit covered in fur.’ ”
Hear her speak here.
Here’s Neil Gaiman on how he developed the Door character.
And James McAvoy says a few words, in character as Richard Mayhew.
David Harewood is obviously enjoying himself immensely as he describes his character Marquis de Carabas, a “foppish, dark, but very dry witty mysterious kind of creature who inhabits London below and is rather mischievous…kind of an Errol-Flynn-type character….”

As the Angel Islington, Benedict Cumberbatch sort of sings.
The mournful tune is the Lyke Wake Dirge, a very old tune from Yorkshire that people would sing at wakes.
The first verse is:
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule
The Radio Times says: “For an extra-eerie effect, open this page in two (or more) windows and start the clip playing for a second time, say 15/20 seconds after the first one has started (the more windows you open, the weirder it gets…)”
I did that, and it was indeed weird. Creepy, too.
An American named Jeff Duntemann translates the song into present-day English and analyses it here.
You can hear a more ornate version of it here.
The BBC’s Main Neverwhere page
The Neverwhere Characters
Neverwhere Schedule/Episode Guide
In 2010, the New Yorker magazine ran a great profile of Neil Gaiman by Dana Goodyear.
Sample: “(Gaiman’s) mode is syncretic, with sources ranging from English folktales to glam rock and the Midrash, and enchantment is his major theme: life as we know it, only prone to visitations by Norse gods, trolls, Arthurian knights, and kindergarten-age zombies. ‘Neil’s writing is kind of fey in the best sense of the word,’ the comic-book writer Alan Moore told me. ‘His best effects come out of people or characters or situations in the real world being starkly juxtaposed with this misty fantasy world.’ The model for Gaiman’s eclecticism is G. K. Chesterton; his work, Gaiman says, ‘left me with an idea of London as this wonderful, mythical, magical place, which became the way I saw the world.’ “
Several pages later: “I’m terribly good at believing things, but I’m really good at believing things when I need them,” he said. “Which in my case tends to be if I’m writing about them.” If he had not been a writer, he says, he would have wanted to design religions. “I’d have a little shop, and people would phone up or come into the shop and they’d say, ‘I’d like a religion,’ ” he said. “And I’d say, ‘Cool, O.K. Where do you stand on guilt, and how do you want to fund it? And would you like sort of a belief in the universe as a huge beneficent organ? Or would you like something more complex?’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, we’d like God to be really big on guilt.’ And I’d say, ‘O.K., how does Wednesday sound to you as a sacred day?’ ”
The first episode of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere can be heard on Saturday, March 16, 2013 at 2:30 p.m. London time (10:30 a.m. in Montreal) and again on Sunday March 16, at 6 p.m. London time (2 p.m. in Montreal)

Actors James McAvoy, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Poulet at the Los Angeles premiere of Starter For 10 at the ArcLight Theatres on February 6, 2007 in Hollywood, California.  –  Not a recent photo, but the only one I have of McAvoy and Cumberbatch together.  (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
source: montrealgazette.com