Author Neil Gaiman

This Makes Me Happy.

From Hero Complex:

“Neverwhere” aired in 1996 as a six-part, three-hour series on British television and now it’s reaching the U.S. in a new 15th anniversary home video collection. The story hinges on a meeting between two people and an act of kindness; a Scot named Richard Mayhew (Gary Bakewell), a businessman in London, stops one night to help an injured girl named Door (Laura Fraser) and then finds himself transported to a different version of the city that feels like a world away. The series then toggles between London Below and London Above, and Mayhew finds himself struggling to find his place in either.

“The genesis of ‘Neverwhere’ was my love of London,” Gaiman said. “Lenny Henry, the executive producer, set it into motion. I bumped into him in London and he said, ‘I want to make a fantasy TV series and my only idea is tribes of homeless people in London.’ I thought about it and I went home and I sent him a long fax. In it I said I didn’t want to do tribes of homeless people in London because I don’t want some kid who’s being abused in Liverpool running away to live on the streets of London because she’s seen how cool it is on television. So I said let’s make it a metaphor, let’s take it one stage further. If we do that, then we can take it someplace very special.”

Read the full story here.