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fuckyeahgoodomens · 2 months

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The Radio Times magazine from the 29 July-04 August 2023 :)

THE SECOND COMING

How did Terry Pratchett and Neil gaiman overcome the small matter of Pratchett's death to make another series of their acclaimed divine comedy?

For all the dead authors in the world,” legendary comedy producer John Lloyd once said, “Terry Pratchett is the most alive.” And he’s right. Sir Terry is having an extremely busy 2023… for someone who died in 2015.

This week sees the release of Good Omens 2, the second series of Amazon’s fantasy comedy drama based on the cult novel Pratchett co-wrote with Neil Gaiman in the late 1980s. This will be followed in the autumn by a new spin-off book from Pratchett’s Discworld series, Tiffany Aching’s Guide to Being a Witch, co-written by Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna and children’s author Gabrielle Kent. The same month, we’ll also get A Stroke of the Pen, a collection of “lost” short stories written by Sir Terry for local newspapers in the 70s and 80s and recently rediscovered. Clearly, while there are no more books coming from Pratchett – a hard drive containing all drafts and unpublished work was crushed by a vintage steamroller shortly after the author’s death, as per his specific wishes – people still want to visit his vivid and addictive worlds in new ways.

Good Omens 2 will be the first test of how this can work. The original book started life as a 5,000-word short story by Gaiman, titled William the Antichrist and envisioned as a bit of a mashup of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books and the 70s horror classic The Omen. What would happen, Gaiman had mused, if the spawn of Satan had been raised, not by a powerful American diplomat, but by an extremely normal couple in an idyllic English village, far from the influence of hellish forces? He’d sent the first draft to bestselling fantasy author Pratchett, a friend of many years, and then forgotten about it as he busied himself with continuing to write his massively popular comic books, including Violent Cases, Black Orchid and The Sandman, which became a Netflix series last year.

Pratchett loved the idea, offering to either buy the concept from Gaiman or co-write it. It was, as Gaiman later said, “like Michelangelo phoning and asking if you want to paint a ceiling” The pair worked on the book together from that point on, rewriting each other as they went and communicating via long phone calls and mailed floppy discs. “The actual mechanics worked like this: I would do a bit, then Neil would take it away and do a bit more and give it back to me,” Pratchett told Locus magazine in 1991. “We’d mess about with each other’s bits and pieces.”

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch – to give it its full title –was published in 1990 to huge acclaim. It was one of, astonishingly, five Terry Pratchett novels to be published that year (he averaged two a year, including 41 Discworld novels and many other standalone works and collaborations).

It was also, clearly, extremely filmable, and studios came knocking — though getting it made took a while. rnvo decades on from its writing, four years after Pratchett's death from Alzheimer's disease aged 66, and after several doomed attempts to get a movie version off the ground, Good Omens finally made it to TV screens in 2019, scripted and show-run by Gaiman himself. "Terry was egging me on to make it into television. He knew he was dying, and he knew that I wouldn't start it without him," Gaiman revealed in a 2019 Radio Times interview. Amazon and the BBC co-produced with Pratchett's company Narrativia and Gaiman's Blank Corporation production studios, with Michael Sheen and David Tennant cast in the central roles of Aziraphale the angel and Crowley the demon. The show was a hit, not just with fans of its two creators, but with a whole new young audience, many of whom had no interest in Discworld or Sandman. Social media networks like Tumblr and TikTok were soon awash with cosplay, artwork and fan fiction. The original novel became, for the first time, a New York Times bestseller.

A follow up was, on one level, a no-brainer. The world Pratchett and Gaiman had created was vivid, funny and accessible, and Tennant and Sheen had found an intriguing romantic spark in their chemistry not present in the novel.

There was, however, a huge problem. There wasn't a second Good Omens book to base it on. But there was the ghost of an idea.

In 1989, after the book had been sold but before it had come out, the two authors had laid on fivin beds in a hotel room at a convention in Seattle and, jet-lagged and unable to sleep, plotted out, in some detail, what would happen in a sequel, provisionally titled 668, The II Neighbour of the Beast.

"It was a good one, too" Gaiman wrote in a 2021 blog. "We fully intended to write it, whenever we next had three or four months free. Only I went to live in America and Terry stayed in the UK, and after Good Omens was published, Sandman became SANDMAN and Discworld became DISCWORLD(TM) and there wasn't a good time."

Back in 1991, Pratchett elaborated, "We even know some of the main characters in it. But there's a huge difference between sitting there chatting away, saying, 'Hey, we could do this, we could do that,' and actually physically getting down and doing it all again." In 2019, Gaiman pillaged some of those ideas for Good Omens series one (for example, its final episode wasn't in the book at all), and had left enough threads dangling to give him an opening for a sequel. This is the well he's returned to for Good Omens 2, co-writing with comic John Finnemore - drafted in, presumably, to plug the gap left Pratchett's unparalleled comedic mind. No small task.

Projects like Good Omens 2 are an important proving ground for Pratchett's legacy: can the universes he conjured endure without their creator? And can they stay true to his spirit? Sir Terry was famously protective of his creations, and there have been remarkably few adaptations of his work considering how prolific he was. "What would be in it for me?" he asked in 2003. "Money? I've got money."

He wanted his work treated reverently and not butchered for the screen. It's why Good Omens and projects like Tiffany Aching's Guide to Being a Witch are made with trusted members of the inner circle like Neil Gaiman and Rhianna Pratchett at the helm. It's also why the author's estate, run by Pratchett's former assistant and business manager Rob Wilkins, keeps a tight rein on any licensed Pratchett material — it's a multi-million dollar media empire still run like a cottage industry.

And that's heartening. Anyone who saw BBC America's panned 2021 Pratchett adaptation The Watch will know how badly these things can go when a studio is allowed to run amok with the material without oversight. These stories deserve to be told, and these worlds deserve to be explored — properly. And there are, apparently, many plans afoot for more Pratchett on the screen. You can only hope that, somewhere, he'll be proud of the results.

After all, as he wrote himself, "No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."

While those ripples continue to spread, Sir Terry Pratchett remains very much alive. MARC BURROWS

DIVINE DUO

An angel and a demon walk into a pub... Michael Sheen and David Tennant on family, friendship and Morecambe & Wise

Outside it's cold winter's day and we're in a Scottish studio, somewhere between Edinburgh and Glasgow. But inside it's lunchtime in The Dirty Donkey pub in the heart of London, with both Michael Sheen and David Tennant surveying the scene appreciatively. "This is a great pub," says Sheen eagerly, while Tennant calls it "the best Soho there can be. A slightly heightened, immaculate, perfect, dreamy Soho."

Here, a painting of the absent landlord — the late Terry Pratchett, co-creator, with Neil Gaiman, of the series' source novel — looms over punters. Around the corner is AZ Fell and Co Antiquarian and Unusual Books. It's the bookshop owned by Sheen's character, the angel Aziraphale, and the place to where Tennant's demon Crowley is inevitably drawn.

It's day 74 of an 80-day shoot for a series that no one, least of all the leading actors, ever thought would happen, due to the fact that Pratchett and Gaiman hadn't ever published any sequel to their 1990 fantasy satire. Tennant explains, "What we didn't know was that Neil and Terry had had plots and plans..."

Still, lots of good things are in Good Omens 2, which expands on the millennia-spanning multiverse of the first series. These include a surprisingly naked side of John Hamm, and roles for both Tennant's father-in-law (Peter Davison) and 21-year-old son Ty. At its heart, though, remains the brilliant banter between the two leading men — as Sheen puts it, "very Eric and Ernie !" — whose chemistry on the first series led to one of the more surprising saviours of lockdown telly.

Good Omens is back — but you've worked together a lot in the meantime. Was there a connective tissue between series one of Good Omens and Staged, your lockdown sitcom?

David: Only in as much as the first series went out, then a few months later, we were all locked in our houses. And because of the work we'd done on Good Omens, it occurred that we might do something else. I mean, Neil Gaiman takes full responsibility for Staged. Which, to some extent, he's probably right to do!

Michael: We've got to know each other through doing this. Our lives have gotten more entwined in all kinds of ways — we have children who've now become friends, and our families know each other.

There have been hints of a romantic storyline between the two characters. How much of an undercurrent is that in this series.

David: Nothing's explicit.

Michael: I felt from the very beginning that part of what would be interesting to explore is that Aziraphale is a character, a being, who just loves. How does that manifest itself in a very specific relationship with another being? Inevitably, as there is with everything in this story, there's a grey area. The fact that people see potentially a "romantic relationship", I thought that was interesting and something to explore.

There was a petition to have the first series banned because of its irreverent take on Christian tropes. Series two digs even more deeply into the Bible with the story of Job. How much of a badge of honour is it that the show riles the people who like to ban things?

David: It's not an irreligious show at all. It's actually very respectful of the structure of that sort of religious belief. The idea that it promotes Satanism [is nonsense]. None of the characters from hell are to be aspired to at all! They're a dreadful bunch of non-entities. People are very keen to be offended, aren't they? They're often looking for something to glom on to without possibly really examining what they think they're complaining about.

Michael, you're known as an activist, and you're in the middle of Making BBC drama The Way, which "taps into the social and political chaos of today's world". Is it important for you to use your plaform to discuss causes you believe in?

Michael: The Way is not a political tract, it's just set in the area that I come from. But it has to matter to you, doesn't it? More and more as I get older, [I find] it can be a real slog doing this stuff. You've got to enjoy it. And if it doesn't matter to you, then it's just going to be depressing.

David, Michael has declared himself a "not-for-profit" actor. Has he tried to persuade you to give up all your money too?

David: What an extraordinary question! One is always aware that one has a certain responsibility if one is fortunate and gets to do a job that often doesn't feel like a job. You want to do your bit whenever you can. But at the same time, I'm an actor. I'm not about to give that up to go into politics or anything. But I'll do what I can from where I live.

Well, your son and your father-in-law are also starring in this series. How about that, jobs for the boys!

David: I know! It was a delight to get to be on set with them. And certainly an unexpected one for me. Neil, on two occasions, got to bowl up to me and say, "Guess who we've cast?!"

How do you feel about your US peers going on strike?

David: It's happening because there are issues that need to be addressed. Nobody's doing this lightly. These are important issues, and they've got to be sorted out for the future of our industry. There's this idea that writers and actors are all living high on the hog. For huge swathes of our industry, that's just not the case. These people have got to be protected.

Michael: We have to be really careful that things don't slide back to the way they were pre the 1950s, when the stories that we told were all coming from one point of view and the stories of certain people, or communities within our society, weren't represented. There's a sense that now that's changed for ever and it'll never go back. But you worry when people can't afford to have the opportunities that other people have. We don't want the story that we tell about ourselves to be myopic. You want it to be as inclusive as possible

Staged series 3 recently broadcast. It felt like the show's last hurrah — or is there more mileage? Sheen and Tennant go on holiday?

David: That's the Christmas special! One Foot in the Algarve! On the Buses Go to Spain!

Michael: I don't think we were thinking beyond three, were we?

So is it time for a conscious uncoupling for you two — Eric and Ernie say goodbye?

David: Oh, never say never, will we?

Michael: And it's more Hinge and Bracket.

David: Maybe that's what we do next — The Hinge and Bracket Story. CRAIG McLEAN

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zack-hazbin-blog · 2 months

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Okay so sorry for not posting anything for days but erm…. Heres the vees!! And cherri, mimzy, and baxter because why not

Vox:

He is very similar to canon I think, so I will use this chance to talk about the differences between my versions of overlords and canon overlords. So in canon overlords are like, people who own a lot of souls but like. They cant do that in my head, like, a sinner cannot own another sinners soul, they dont have that power over eachother. So in this an overlord is someone who is able to keep full control over a certain amount of territory, and there are loads of overlords, Pandemonium (Pentagram City, Pandemonium is the name of the capital of hell in paradise lost so im stealing it lol) is a big place and theres a lot of room, however, there are different levels of overlords. Like, theres the big group that own whole regions of the city (including Rosie, the Vees, Zeezi, Carmilla, Zestial, ect.) but then they have a lot of people under them who own smaller chunks of land. I think that its a system of blocks, like small time overlords own a system of blocks and big time overlords deal in groups of 6 blocks called bolgias (term borrowed from Dante’s Inferno). The Big Big Players own thousands of bolgias, with the Vees having the most land and owning much of the West side of the inner part of the city.

Vox is the original Vee, he was a TV host/budding actor who died in the early 50s, and he has a very messy history with Al. The two were actually pretty good friends till like, the mid sixties, until Vox, under the impression that there was a mutual romantic connection, tried to like, advance the relationship. Alastor, being aroace, wasn’t interested, and being really stupid, panicked and like ghosted Vox for years afterwards. Vox kinda took this as “he thinks hes to good for me” and got like really mad about it. Valentino was like his rebound relationship, they partnered up shortly after Val died in the 70s and started climbing the ranks pretty quickly. While Val and Angel were together for a while, Vox and Val were always very much romantically involved. Vox, as much as he acts differently, really is just after domesticity. He wants to live in a sitcom, he wants nice, soft, things. He just gets in his own way because A) he keeps going after the worst people you will ever meet and; B) also kind of sucks, like, hes a tempermental jerk. He almost had something genuine with Al and this is one of the main reasons hes still hung up on it?? If that makes sense, like,,,, Alastor held the door open for him one (1) time 60 years ago and it still keeps him up at night, he is so emotionally desperate its like, sad.

I saw in the like,,, leaked audition character card things that were floating around that he was a cult leader in life??? I dont like that at all lol, hes just, he was a TV personality who did some shady things. I think his sin would be Envy/Greed and I think he probably killed his co-star/probably some other people and I think he got away with it. Like, I do not think he was ever caught, probably died in an altercation with one of his partners that he genuinely does not remember (raging alcoholic later in life) and was never posthumously convicted of anything (though he probably featured on a Buzzfeed Unsolved ep at some point.) Also he has a pet land shark named Vark. I dont care that its stupid I love Vark we are keeping Vark, Vark is like a golden retriever except he is a six foot long giant shark. Vox would do anything for him and Vark has had at least one playdate with Fat Nuggets the pig while Angel was living in the Vee tower.

Valentino:

I really dont like the direction they took for Val in canon, I dont like how dumb he is sorry. I get why they did it I just. Ugh. Hes different here, hes in hell for exactly what you think, and he is Vox’s horrible business partner/on-again-off-again boyfriend. He is a lot less temperamental than Vox, I think hes very manipulative, he a lot of the time serves as the mediator of the trio, awful as that is. This isnt to say he isnt mean, hes very mean, hes just calculated about it. He legitimately does not do a lot for the company, like he runs some things but he isnt involved with a WHOLE lot besides managing the other two, if he were kicked out the only thing that would suffer would be Vox’s general mental state because for whatever reason he is head over heels for this guy.

Hes Angels absolutely awful ex and the only reason he dedicates any thought to the hotel is because hes mad at Angel for dumping him, he is full of violent intent but also smart enough to know that trying to do something to the daughter of lucifer’s hotel is a bad idea. Hes waiting it out till Angel gets sick of it there

I dont. Have an image of him. I have drawn him but have no way of transfering the drawing to my computer right now but I have changed him from a moth to a Honeypot Ant because I dont want two hispanic moths. The honeypot bit is like full of pink goo if that makes any kind of sense, he has pink goo butt and pink smoke pheromone stuff and a furry little jacket. I hate him.

Velvette Redde:

OHHOOHOHHGG SHES A DOOZY. I accidentally got really insane over velvette so um. Bear with me here. Velvette is by far the youngest of the Big Overlords, having only died in 2010, the second youngest being Zeezi (they died in the early 90s) (they’re the big rave dinosaur from the Carmilla episode we’ll get to them later) Velvette is not nearly as powerful as the other power players because she has not had nearly as much time to really cultivate her powers, shes only ascended through the ranks so fast because Vox and Val saw her carving out a niche among the smaller overlords in their territory and scooped her up and brought her into the team (they needed someone business minded, theyre both performers really, shes young, shes already pretty capable, her name starts with V, it was perfect) Besides being the other two’s business manager, she is a fashion designer, the social media demon thing was stupid okay. Shes the social media overlord in the same sense as grandparents who regard their grandkid who knows how to reset the router as a tech wiz. She is a prominent fashion designer in Pandemonium and also non-profesionally dabbles in baking, tribute to JTL, worst fanon of all time (affectionate)

As a result of being the youngest overlord, and just. Her personality in general, she feels like she has a lot to prove. Shes very snippy and harsh, her and Vox get into a lot of scraps. She cannot stand Val, she cannot stand him but like. Needs him in her mind, he and Vox made her, she needs them to stay on top, at least until shes a little bit stronger, and not staying on top is not an option so shes playing nice for now. Her and Vox are surprisingly buddy-buddy, shes a considerable bit younger than both of them (shes mid 20s and theyre both mid-30s, around the same as Al) but her and Vox get along pretty good when they arent petty squabbling. Shes a cat person but tolerates (adores) Vark the Shark. She is a workaholic, if Vox and Val are the couple meme thing with the fancy fluffy robe and the ebeneezer scrooge nightgown she is a secreet third option thats just her clothes.

I will eventually make playlists for a lot of these characters but like, combine Oh No! and Are You Satisfied? by Marina and The Diamonds with Icicles by the Scary Jokes and youve got a good start to Velvette. ALSO,,,, Im making her x Cherri Bomb canon in this. They will eventually get their own post but I am so obsessed with them its INSANE. Also yes she did choose that name post mortem, yes it is a pun on red velvet cake, no she does not regret it.

Cherri Bomb:

LOOK OUT WORLD SHES A WILD GIRL SHES A CH CH CH CH CH CH CH CH CHERRY BOOOMMBB!! Angel’s aussie bestie who died in the 80s in a riot she insited. Shes like. You know how people draw human rainbow dash dressing like Adam Sandler? Shes like that but punk version. Shes so butch shes so goofy she draws her eyeliner on in sharpie and has had the same jacket since she landed down here, she would kill and die for Angel in a heartbeat but refuses to have a conversation about (gag) feelings…

She is an anti-authoritarian with a pyromaniac streak who has absolutely no problem letting Angel stay at the princess’s hotel to eat up her resources but like. Starts to feel a little bit weird about it when he starts to seem like he actually likes it there. And its totally not because shes insecure about how much happier he seems with them than he seemed with her. Its totally not because she is riddled with enough abandonment issues to choke a horse, no definitely not. She just doesnt like that hes falling victim to the man!!! Cue Someone Gets Hurt (reprise) type of scene between her and Angel and Angel temporarily leaving the hotel but them making up and her not being actively against the hotel so long as its helping Angel over the course of a couple episode arc in a hypothetical mid-season-one conflict!

After this she would probably just. Hang around the hotel without actually staying there, shes there for Angel reasons but I think she’d become pretty friendly with the others after a bit. Her and Mimzy are friends I think, and as much as she insists on having a grudge against Charlie shes alright with Vallie (“Punks and goths run in the same circles, we gotta have eachothers backs! Even if ya are a stick in the mud.” “...okay..?”) ALSO HER AND VELVETTTEEEEE their shipname is CherryCupcake and i will NEVER be over it okay. Also Cherri has not kept up with like, any modern trends besides music, she is a big music buff and is one of the few people who says they like all music and means it. Shes so cool i love her soooooooooo muchhhh okay.

Mimzy:

I dont have a drawing of her yet but Im turning her into a cocker spaniel partially because I think she really likes dogs and this is a cutsey dog that was big in the 20s and partially because i think its funny with Alastors dog-phobia. Her and Alastor are childhood friends in this, she moved from New York to New Orleans when she was like eight and did that thing where an extrovert just like, adopts an introvert with Al (he was kind of regarded as the weird kid when he was little, very shy had not grown into the larger-than-life-annyoing-on-purpose persona yet) and they were friends forever after yayyyyyy. She moved back to New York when they were teens to try and get back on the broadway scene but came back for a little while after Alastor’s radio show started to get big (they were both in their early 20s, it was like 1922 and Al’s mom hadnt died yet, he wasnt on the murder train quuuiiiittee yet she wasnt around for that). She had a very short lived crush at this time, told im about it, he rejected (obviously) and they didnt really. Talk. after she moved back to New York. This was mostly imposed by Alastor who started deliberately ignoring her calls and letters in the desperate hope to avoid any sort of awkward conversation.

She is kind of meant to be a parallel to Vox to help showcase what a disaster Alastor is socially except Mimzy is like. Not at all upset about the initial rejection, shes mad that he ghosted her for the remainder of her life (she died in the late 20s, a few years before Al) and the two dont really. Talk. in hell. No efforts have been made to fix things because shes waiting for him to do it which he will never do, he doesnt even know what shes upset about, he thinks that the issue arose out of unrequited romance. Hes stupid. So they had not talked in YEARS at the start of the show, and then she shows up at the hotel. She didnt show up at the hotel for Alastor but like. Shes aware that he is there. Its a situation. They fight and they dont make up persay because this is season one and Alastor is still this unshakeable presence, while this would be the first time in this hypothetical show that we see him waver he is still very solid, there is no apology, but at least the issue is in the open air now. Occasional petty fighting and even more occasional moments of fondness reminicent of what there once was ensues.

Mimzy is a big fan of Niffty and Angel, and she is genuinely invested in the idea of redemption, she wants to be better, she regrets everything that landed her in Hell (getting involved with the wrong crowd to off some of her competition, her sin is greed, she was later offed by said wrong crowd because she was going to spill to the police) Probably not a super major character tho, just because. Shes in a lot of episodes she just doesnt get a lot of focus, love her its just. Every character cant be a main character and the cast is already bloated. Its very much the same for Baxter and Crymini.

Baxter:

Funny fish guy!!! 1910s scientist in hell for medical malpractice. He is trans (so is husk) and he probably did his own top surgery, I hate him (affectionate.) If you have ever played bugsnax like. Think Floofty Fizzlebean and youve got it. He has set up lab in the hotel’s basement which is also the laundry room which is how he becomes acquainted with Niffty in the first place. He is very. Antisocial, he doesnt exactly hate everyone people just scare him, he avoids them when he can, he and Niffty do genuinely become quite close, with her acting as an impromptu lab assistant on occasion. There is also shipping. Hello four people in the BaxNiff community. Im not gonna get crazy into shipping here but theyre cute they are When He Sees Me from Waitress (Niffty POV) they are Inarticulation by Rio Romeo (Baxter POV) and I love them, there is not a lot to say on Baxter hes just silly guy who would say My God! As he stares in horror and fascination at the monstrosity he has created he would say Eureka and I love him for it. Victor Frankenstien wannabe.

And thats that, I think that the Heaven Gang will be next. Im very excited to talk about Adam and Lute because they are. Very Different than in canon. Adam got hit with the divorced dad beam and Lute is nonbinary now… Eve is there too shes awesome. You’ll see

#sorry for lack of art this go round #will be updated as it becomes available #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel critical #hazbin redesign #hazbin rewrite #hazbin velvette #hazbin vox #hazbin valentino #hazbin mimzy #hazbin baxter

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