All the while trying to work out how to get back to his old life in London Above. 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. 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. 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. 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 somewhere that is Neverwhere.Īn act of kindness sees Richard Mayhew catapulted from his ordinary life into a subterranean world under the streets of London. A subterranean labyrinth of sewers and abandoned tube stations.

Running for just a single six-episode series, Neverwhere went on to be adapted as an acclaimed novel by Gaiman, as well as a graphic novel and, most recently, a BBC Radio adaptation featuring the likes of James McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch.Beneath the streets of London there is another London. Joseph's electric turn as the mysterious and unpredictable Marquis de Carabas is often held up as evidence as to why he would make an ideal future Doctor himself. The BBC series featured actors such as Paterson Joseph ( Peep Show), Laura Fraser ( Breaking Bad) and future Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi. Much of what we see in this original story is only briefly touched upon - there is so much left to explore, so much history only briefly alluded to. There's legendary hunters on a quest to slay the Beast of London, vampire-like seductresses who suck the warmth from their victims, and so on and so forth. From this starting point we meet all sorts of weird and frightening folk from Mr Croup & Mr Vandemar, a pair of hired killers who delight in their dirty work and seem to posses magical powers, to people who worship and talk to rats, gun-toting Friars.

Neverwhere bbc radio