Neil Gaiman's Likely Stories Season 1, Episode 3: Closing Time

Foreign Parts

There's a sense that time is running out. Our narrator, Simon, is like a man sinking in quicksand. He’s a man of routine. Rising, dressing, travelling to work on the DLR. Every day is the same. His sense of self is slipping away as he becomes (perhaps literally) someone else. It's a similar story for Dr Benham, stuck in his STD clinic watching a parade of patients come and go. In his parallel story of metamorphosis he’s being spat out by his own life. He too is becoming a different person, from the feet up.

22 min

Feeders and Eaters

We’re caught in the nocturnal world of the all-night café. Joyce, a very pregnant young waitress, is our way in. A man from her past, Eddie Barrow, appears as if from nowhere with a pressing urgency to tell his story. Joyce wants us to hear it. Eddie tells us a love story – a strange, Gothic, warped and weird love story. He tells us about Effie, the old lady who lives in a room opposite his in a boarding house. Effie is a remarkable, magical woman. However, she needs raw meat to survive.

Looking for the Girl

Dean Smith is an ageing photographer. He’s almost 70, but there’s still a glint in his eye. TV’s ‘face of culture’, Miranda Walker, is interviewing him for television and asks about his muse. Once the cameras are off the question unlocks a story about Charlotte, aged 19, a Penthouse model. As old magazines and photographs are pulled from shelves it emerges that he’s a man consumed by an untouchable fantasy. A two-dimensional image sparked a moment of sexual awakening that he’s spent a lifetime trying to recapture.