The Sandman

"So now for something totally different, let’s talk about The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. I wouldn’t say The Sandman is a comfort read! The Sandman is an audio adaption of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series. The graphic novels are not new—they’ve been ongoing for many years—but the series has been adapted by Dirk Maggs and performed with this incredible cast that’s led by James McAvoy. Neil is in it—who is of course a wonderful storyteller himself—Michael Sheen, Taron Egerton, Bebe Neuwirth, Andy Serkis. It’s a great cast and the adaption that Dirk Maggs did is brilliant. If you’re not familiar with him, he was a collaborator with Douglas Adams on all The Hitchhiker’s Guides . So he has done many different adaptions and productions of audio drama and this is quite something. It’s dark, it’s very mysterious, but it’s very engrossing as a listening experience. It was too scary for me, but I loved the audio experience of it. It is and it’s also in the long British tradition of radio plays. This is the top of the art form in terms of that kind of adaption, with every detail—the sound, the sound effects, the music—everything is beautifully orchestrated and brilliantly done."

"Crossing gender is not phenomenal in Neil Gaiman’s universe – it just happens. In his cosmology desire has no gender, which is a profound statement in and of itself. There are trans characters in the books, including one based on a common friend of ours, Roz Kaveney, a poet and trans activist. The Sandman doesn’t exactly make trans normal, but he makes it something that’s expected. The one that comes to mind is the serial killer from Silence of the Lambs . By golly, that really hurt to see a psychotic serial killer cast as a transsexual in a big picture. The character, Jame Gumb, was a parody of everything you were afraid of becoming when you started your own transgender journey. That’s trans phobia. Transphobia is fear of anything that doesn’t match the either/or standard for gender regulation. It’s on a par with antisemitism, racism, classism, ageism and homophobia. Gender is ruled by the binary distinction between man and woman – anything other is really scary. What is that? Is that a him or a her or an it? How do I deal with it? I’ve never been taught."