BBC Radio 4, Christmas Day, and thereafter on iPlayer

When Fat Charlie travels to his father’s funeral, a whole new world opens up before him…

The audio dream team of Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs are together again for this Christmas special, with Maggs adapting Gaiman’s award winning 2005 novel in six parts (with the final one being an hour rather than the standard half). As we’ve come to expect, Maggs finds many ways to bring out the layers within Gaiman’s text, so that the listener coming to the story fresh doesn’t miss out on the nuances of language that characterise Gaiman’s prose.

The first episode is far more than just a scene-setter: we meet Fat Charlie (a nickname whose derivation is quickly explained) as he arrives for the funeral, and instantly realise what sort of person he is – not perhaps the pushiest or smartest – as we learn about his father, Mr Nancy. Allegra McIlroy’s direction and Wilfredo Acosta’s sound design help draw the listener into the story and those flashbacks allow us to accept the more fantastical elements that are gradually introduced so that when we encounter the third member of the family you can easily believe what he’s up to – and what he does at the end of the episode.

I’ll talk more about the cast in the later reviews, but all in this first episode seem to have slipped naturally into character – Lenny Henry’s Mr Nancy and Jacob Anderson’s Charlie in particular.

Verdict: A very strong start to this latest tale. 9/10

Paul Simpson