The BBC’s Gormenghast Shouldn’t Be Remembered as a Flop, But For Its Raving Ambition 

In mid-April 1999, production designer Christopher Hobbs lost a night’s sleep to the creation of several enormous pyramid-shaped jellies. Each one contained over 150 packets of Rowntree’s lime-flavoured jelly cubes, was topped with a single red cherry rigged to vibrate on demand, and – naturally – had been designed in homage to the work of Spanish surrealist sculptor Joan Miró.

The jellies were to furnish a banquet table at Gormenghast Castle, a labyrinthine location from the mind of writer-artist Mervyn Peake which was being brought to life for a landmark BBC adaptation of the first two novels in his 1940s Gormenghast trilogy. They were one tiny background element in a web of painstaking design from the Gormenghast art team. The sets were dotted with references to 20^th century artists Max Ernst and Paul Klee, as well as filmmakers Luis Bunuel and Federico Fellini. “Spot the painting, sort of thing,” explained director Andy Wilson in this behind-the-scenes interview. “We were trying to make an artist’s vision of the world.”

In that, the four-part Gormenghast adaptation excelled. The castle sets, which filmed almost every sound stage at Shepperton Studios in the spring and summer of 1999, were rich with ideas, atmosphere and detail. From the soon-to-be-burned-down library to the attics, rooftops, hall of Bright Carving and cat room, watching the series was like touring a surrealist exhibition. 

Peopling that exhibition were Gormenghast’s characters, oddities created by Peake in his absurdist satire on class, nobility and ritual. Castle cook Swelter, family childminder Nannie Slagg, brainless royals Cora and Clarice, Dr Prunesquallor and his long-necked sister Irma, as well as the ruling family Lord Groan Lady Gertrude, Lady Fuschia and the infant heir Titus were played by the cream of the British stage and screen. Christopher Lee, Celia Imrie, Zoe Wanamaker, Richard Griffiths, Stephen Fry, Spike Milligan… the collected cast would fill every portrait frame hanging on the walls at BAFTA twice over. In what seemed like the only allowance made to mainstream appeal, the handsome Jonathan Rhys Meyers was cast in the lead role of Steerpike, the novels’ unbeautiful kitchen boy whose ascent through the castle threatens the old regime. (In fact, director Andy Wilson described Rhys Meyers as looking “exactly like a Mervyn Peake drawing of Steerpike,” so even his good looks turned out to have been instrumental in the overall goal of evoking Peake’s vision.)

With a high-calibre cast, beautiful costumes and a bigger budget than most BBC four-parters could dream of (reports ranged from £6 million to £10 million), as well as a pre-publicity campaign that saw Rhys-Meyers’ Steerpike on the front of magazines and the sides of buses, Gormenghast was set to become a BBC Two drama showcase for the new millennium. And so it was, for episode one, drawing a healthy audience for the channel of 4.2 million. By the next episode though, that number had almost halved to 2.4 million, and dwindled from there. Despite praise for its design and cast, the adaptation was quickly labelled a flop.

What made viewers turn away? The story, said some, and the unlikable characters. Then-ITV controller of network drama Nick Elliott described the adaptation as “emperor’s clothes time” when speaking to The Guardian in 2000. “There was no serious content in terms of narrative or people you take seriously enough to want to watch. I have to admit I turned off.”

One argument is that not enough had been done to soften Peake’s spiky, satirical and let’s face it, bizarre and slow, story for a broad audience that needed characters to root for. Steerpike was an antihero just as US prestige TV was being born, but unlike Tony Soprano or Stringer Bell, he came from the world of fantasy, a genre that’s historically struggled to be taken seriously for adult audiences on UK television. 

The creators of Gormenghast seem to have had something of a hold-your-nose attitude to the fantasy genre themselves. As director Andy Wilson explained in this featurette. “There’s no magic, there’s no zapping, there’s no Star Wars, there’s no zap guns or poufs when people turn into frogs. It’s all very realistic and the characters have a very realistic set of emotions.”

That’s one take on it. Another might be that Peake’s cerebral satire of arcane ritual, child emperors and fusty passed-on tradition was neither realistic enough nor fantasy enough for its audience. Simply put, it fell between two stools and a pre-Game of Thrones TV audience didn’t quite know what to make of it. Had there either been magic and zapping, or had the characters not felt as though they’d walked out of a queasily adult take on Alice’s Wonderland, perhaps viewers would have got it, but then of course, it wouldn’t have been Gormenghast.

Being Gormenghast seems to have been the adaptation’s real problem. Peake’s ensemble characters may sound like they’re out of Dickens, but there’s none of Dickens’ appealing sentimentality in play here. These characters are vain, greedy, stupid, self-serving and callously insane, as befits this class satire. As Downton Abbey and The Crown have shown, audiences love a ruling-classes drama, but they prefer nostalgic ones where the ruling classes are winsome and put-upon and trying their best to stem the tide of crude modernity. A royal family drama that starts with a labouring mother pushing out an infant and then demanding “Bring him back when he’s six” and turning back to her albino raven and roomful of white cats isn’t going to warm anybody’s cockles about the good old days.

Gormenghast was very much not a ‘good old days’ drama. It was weird and absurdist and political and loftily ambitious. Despite the relatively big budget and dedicated work from the art team, it still struggled to evoke the scope and depth of Peake’s vast creation. Hoping for mainstream success with the first screen adaptation of these 20^th-century-crisis novels was in all likelihood, a folly. The planned TV version announced in 2018 would probably have fallen at the same hurdles. 

But what a folly the 2000 version was. Unsettling and visionary, it may not have won over audience’s hearts and minds, but it stands as a monument to audacious artistry from the kind of creators who cared about every last detail on screen, from the castle walls to the banquet table jellies.

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