DVD review
Directed by Dewi Humphreys
Starring Gary Bakewell, Laura Fraser, Hywel Bennett, Clive Russell, Paterson Joseph
Release date Out now

City worker Richard Mayhew’s ordered, boring life is thrown into disarray when he meets Door – a woman from an alternative, subterranean London that is split into feuding clans…

A script by Neil Gaiman from an idea conceived by Lenny Henry. A score by Brian Eno. A title sequence designed by David McKean. Let’s face it, Neverwhere sounds very cool indeed (well okay, maybe not the Lenny Henry bit). The reality of this 1996 mini-series is rather less cool thanks to some pretty feeble visuals, but the unusual, inventive narrative makes it worth sticking with.

Gaiman’s story is a low-key quest fantasy and incorporates the old rabbit-down-the-hole device. It’s a clever concept that features plenty of amusingly literal incarnations of the London tube map such as the Black Friars (they’re black, they’re friars), the Raven’s Court and The Angel Islington (played by Peter Capaldi). It’s certainly an intriguing setup, though it does fizzle out a little by episode six.

Mostly, the acting is excellent. Gary Bakewell’s Richard is a likeable everyman hero, while Laura Fraser is mysteriously appealing as Door (although she doesn’t really develop beyond the kind of one-dimensional native that regularly crops up in Stargate). Paterson Joseph is also amusing as the roguish Marquis De Carabas, but Peep Show fans might find it difficult to shake images of the perma-smarmy Johnson.

Best of all are Hywel Bennett and Clive Russell as assassins-for-hire Croup and Vandemaar. Their comically nasty banter is a joy (“I like it when the eyeballs fall out!”) and they manage to steal every scene they appear in, whether they’re using frogs as golf balls or snacking on rats and birds.

Neil Gaiman provides the DVD with a softly spoken and slightly awkward commentary, and he is refreshingly honest about what lets the show down. Despite often looking studio-bound, it was actually filmed on location in underground tunnels. Gaiman reveals how one of the BBC’s stipulations for commissioning the show was that it was shot on video for budget reasons; it was initially intended to be run through a filter that would make it appear as if it was shot on film but this never happened. The direct result is that the visuals appear over-lit and very dated (or very “Doctor Who” as Gaiman puts it).

It’s a shame because what should have been dark and brooding ends up looking like something cobbled together by The BBC Television Shakespeare in the early 1980s. Gaiman recalls how copies of the show used to circulate on eBay which added a strangely preferable fuzzy quality – this cleaned-up DVD unfortunately only amplifies the series’s faults.

Director Humphreys usually limits himself to appalling BBC sitcoms (including 2point4 Children, My Family and Chef!), and his direction is mostly uninspired and at odds with Eno’s wonderfully weird soundtrack. Yet there is the occasional moment when he does break free the restraints of traditional television programme making, especially in one trippy sequence where Richard (for reasons not entirely clear) must undergo an ‘ordeal’ in order to get his hands on a key.

You get the feeling that Gaiman could see that the potential of the story wasn’t quite realised, and he expanded Neverwhere as a novel a year later. It’s great to see this curious show again after all these years, but it’s not quite the classic it could have been. Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 7/10
Look beyond the visuals, and Neverwhere is an imaginative and sometimes amusing British fantasy.