I just noticed "eep" backwards is "pee."  Do I get any points for that?

I didn't even know they'd used Peake's youth in China as the inspiration here— and you're correct, it's a wholly ungrounded approach.  I've always accepted that Gormenghast is England, through and through; and the books are an "angry young man" reaction to its stultification and ritual.

They're good with their hands, the Jawas, but not trustworthy.

That would be amazing, if truly an insane undertaking.  But it would be fun to actually see his musical numbers performed.  And the Learned English Dog, and the duck!

…and as Dr. Joyboy in The Loved One.

That's an amazing story.  I think it'd make a fascinating show— the dynamics of this small community being totally (and maybe permanently) upended.  I could imagine it becoming a kind of Breaking Bad-style study in moral decay.

This Newswire is actually an unused plot thread from Life's Too Short.

I definitely think that one could (and should) parcel out the actual special effects.  One problem I had with the Joss Whedon shows, entertaining as they were, was that one was rarely actually scared of the evil, because it was constantly on view.

Those guys who made the B&W silent version of Call of Cthulhu ought to try that story.  Something with a similar feel might do quite well.

Well I definitely think it would have to be a limited-run sort of thing — you probably couldn't drag it out to the length of The X-Files.  But I could imagine a good three or four season arc with a definite endpoint.

How about a Lovecraft-inspired show?  The Cthulhu Files, sort of a Kolchak-among-the-shoggoths conceit.  You could sort of knit together his works into a loose-limbed continuing narrative and have a "Pickman" episode and an Innsmouth arc and so on.

Actually I've always been surprised that hasn't been filmed— the book's images are so strong you'd think it would be a natural for movies.

Yep, that's the one.  Some of the casting wasn't bad— Griffiths for example made a good Swelter I thought, John Sessions a plausible Prunesquallor and the actress who played Irma as well, and Stephen Fry (being about as good as anyone could be in the role who wasn't John Cleese) as Bellgrove.

There was already a two-part BBC miniseries of the Gormenghast novels, but I'd like to see them done better, as a full-scale Dickensian epic rather than the half-cocked Lewis Carroll story they were turned into.

The chauffeur is still creepy, but the rest of it, yes, does not hold up.

You fargin' eyesholes!!

I feel like that's a movie that had the right instincts but really got hurt by studio editing… the ending feels garbled and seems to jettison the more careful low-key sequences that built up to it.

Apparently, so did Stephen King.

Jeopardy (that your soul's in)

As someone who really only knows her from Peep Show and the other Mitchell & Webb shows, I was quite struck by the strength of her performance in this episode.  The more I see her in the more she impresses.