Jan 7, 2018

RhoDeo 1801 Neverwhere 2

Hello,

 Confused ? Why not delve into London's underbelly......'N Joy

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Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman born 10 November 1960 is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book (2008). In 2013, The Ocean at the End of the Lane was voted Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards

Gaiman was able to read at the age of four. He said, "I was a reader. I loved reading. Reading things gave me pleasure. I was very good at most subjects in school, not because I had any particular aptitude in them, but because normally on the first day of school they'd hand out schoolbooks, and I'd read them—which would mean that I'd know what was coming up, because I'd read it." When he was about ten years old, he read his way through the works of Dennis Wheatley, where especially The Ka of Gifford Hillary and The Haunting of Toby Jugg made an impact on him. One work that made a particular impression on him was J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings from his school library, although it only had the first two volumes of the novel. He consistently took them out and read them. He would later win the school English prize and the school reading prize, enabling him to finally acquire the third volume.

For his seventh birthday, Gaiman received C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series. He later recalled that "I admired his use of parenthetical statements to the reader, where he would just talk to you ... I'd think, 'Oh, my gosh, that is so cool! I want to do that! When I become an author, I want to be able to do things in parentheses.' I liked the power of putting things in brackets." Narnia also introduced him to literary awards, specifically the 1956 Carnegie Medal won by the concluding volume. When Gaiman won the 2010 Medal himself, the press reported him recalling, "it had to be the most important literary award there ever was" and observing, "if you can make yourself aged seven happy, you're really doing well – it's like writing a letter to yourself aged seven."

Gaiman has said Roger Zelazny was the author who influenced him the most, with this influence particularly seen in Gaiman's literary style and the topics he writes about. Other authors Gaiman says "furnished the inside of my mind and set me to writing" include Moorcock, Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Angela Carter, Lafferty and Le Guin.

In the early 1980s, Gaiman pursued journalism, conducting interviews and writing book reviews, as a means to learn about the world and to make connections that he hoped would later assist him in getting published. He wrote and reviewed extensively for the British Fantasy Society. His first professional short story publication was "Featherquest", a fantasy story, in Imagine Magazine in May 1984.

When waiting for a train at London's Victoria Station in 1984, Gaiman noticed a copy of Swamp Thing written by Alan Moore, and carefully read it. Moore's fresh and vigorous approach to comics had such an impact on Gaiman that he would later write "that was the final straw, what was left of my resistance crumbled. I proceeded to make regular and frequent visits to London's Forbidden Planet shop to buy comics".

In 1984, he wrote his first book, a biography of the band Duran Duran, as well as Ghastly Beyond Belief, a book of quotations, with Kim Newman. Even though Gaiman thought he had done a terrible job, the book's first edition sold out very quickly. When he went to relinquish his rights to the book, he discovered the publisher had gone bankrupt. After this, he was offered a job by Penthouse. He refused the offer.

He also wrote interviews and articles for many British magazines, including Knave. During this he sometimes wrote under pseudonyms, including Gerry Musgrave, Richard Grey, and "a couple of house names". Gaiman has said he ended his journalism career in 1987 because British newspapers regularly publish untruths as fact. In the late 1980s, he wrote Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion in what he calls a "classic English humour" style. Following this he wrote the opening of what would become his collaboration with fellow English author Terry Pratchett on the comic novel Good Omens, about the impending apocalypse.

...more later


Neverwhere is a radio drama based on the novel Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. It was dramatized by Dirk Maggs.

Created by       Neil Gaiman
Written by         Neil Gaiman, Dirk Maggs
Directed by      Dirk Maggs, Heather Larmour
Produced by    Heather Larmour

Broadcast

On Saturday 16 March 2013, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast the first, hour-long, episode of Neverwhere. The subsequent five half-hour episodes were broadcast throughout the following week on Radio 4 Extra and made available worldwide after broadcast on BBC iPlayer. It was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 4 starting on Dec 25th 2013 and continuing for 6 days.


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 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.

So begins a curious and mysterious adventure deep beneath the streets of London, a London of shadows where the tube cry of 'Mind the Gap' takes on new meaning; for the inhabitants of this murky domain are those who have fallen through the gaps in society, the dispossessed, the homeless. Here Richard meets the Earl of Earl's Court, Old Bailey and Hammersmith, faces a life-threatening ordeal at the hands of the Black Friars, comes face to face with Great Beast of London, and encounters an Angel. Called Islington.

Joining the mysterious girl named Door and her companions, the Marquis de Carabas and the bodyguard, Hunter, Richard embarks on an extraordinary quest to escape from the clutches of the fiendish assassins Croup and Vandemar and to discover who ordered them to murder her family. All the while trying to work out how to get back to his old life in London Above.

A six part adaption of Neil Gaiman's novel adapted by Dirk Maggs, sees James McAvoy as Richard lead a stellar cast

Cast

Richard Mayhew - James McAvoy
Lady Door - Natalie Dormer
The Marquis de Carabas - David Harewood
Hunter - Sophie Okonedo
The Angel Islington - Benedict Cumberbatch
Mr. Croup - Anthony Head
Mr. Vandemar - David Schofield
Old Bailey - Bernard Cribbins
Lamia - Lucy Cohu
The Abbott - George Harris
The Earl - Sir Christopher Lee
Jessica - Romola Garai
Figgis/The Fop With No Name - Neil Gaiman
Tooley - Andrew Sachs
Fuliginous/Ruislip/Blackfriar - Don Gilet
Sable/Sump/Clarence/Homeless man - Abdul Salis
Gary/Second Guard - Paul Chequer
Anaesthesia/Female Tenant/Match Girl - Yasmin Paige
Lord Ratspeaker - Johnny Vegas
Varney/Homeless man/Letting Agent/First Guard - Stephen Marcus
Sylvia/Old woman/Dream Hawker/Mother - Karen Archer
Lord Portico/Stockton - Jon Glover
Iliaster - Paul Stonehouse





02 Earl's Court 28:27



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