Neil Gaiman Meets the Mainstream
Posted on October 24, 2007
Neil Gaiman says in a new interview that he'd like to work with the BBC again, perhaps creating an original work to air on British television. He also talks about the changing attitudes towards genre writers.
BBC Television, which flirted with Gaiman a decade ago when it made a disappointing small-screen version of his London-based novel Neverwhere, has been courting him with renewed vigour. "Things have changed so much. The BBC, bless their little cotton socks, now like fantasy and now like me a lot and I would love to do something more for them," he says. "I've been in talks with the BBC for about two years about doing an original fantasy series for them, which I keep putting off because my plate is so full. I think it's time to clear some plate for them. My agents would rather that I didn't take eight months and do something for the BBC – writing a Hollywood movie is infinitely more remunerative. But there's something so special for me about doing English television and assembling a great cast."It's been incredibly frustrating for many genre writers, who don't feel their work is taken seriously. As for the romance writers, you wouldn't believe how rude the literati often is to them. All that is changing, though. A science fiction writer just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Sales are booming for science fiction, fantasy, comics and romance. It's a good thing.*****
On the morning of this interview he had been a guest on BBC Radio 3. "On one side of me is an Oxford professor of English and on the other is Bernard Malamud's biographer. I'm being taken seriously on a level that would have been inconceivable for someone who wrote comics, children's stories and fantasies to have been taken seriously 15 years ago. It simply wouldn't have happened. Not only am I there but they are perfectly accepting of all of those hats that I wear; the comic thing is cool and exciting and hip and the graphic novels are in and they're great. They have been in and great long enough that now people are regarding them as part of the literary landscape and not as a novelty."