"I don't want to see any more furniture or monkeys!"

Gormenghast was a lavish BBC production from 2000 in which we visit the insular world of the same name. Mervyn Peake created a land which doesn’t exist in our world. It isn’t a grand and sweeping creation like Tolkein’s Middle Earth. Gormenghast is a single sprawling castle surrounded by trees. There is nothing beyond the castle save a range of mountains. No other castles, no lands to be at war with. Just the castle.

The design is a timeless mix of styles. It is rich, colourful and utterly decadent. The clothes range from the Elizabethan splendour of the gowns to the nineteenth century school masters in their dusty robes and mortar boards. John Sessions’ hair is straight out of Babylon 5 and Christopher Lee’s beard might almost have been reused in Lord of the Rings.

Just as geography and fashion do not obey the laws of our reality so too time plays tricks. In the stagnant world of the castle it does not flow. The serial takes place over seventeen years. We know this because it opens with the birth of Titus and ends with him aged seventeen (possibly slightly older). And yet none of the characters age in that time (except the boy Titus). The only change which happens occurs after death. Life is at a standstill in Gormenghast. Hair does not grey nor skin wrinkle. The magnificent makeup job which transforms the naturally beautiful Celia Imrie into the fearsome Gertrude shows that the production team had the means to age the cast but chose not to. Even her pet bird seems to be immune to the passage of the years as he is every bit as young and bright at the end as he was in the beginning.

The focus of the story is young Steerpike. Initially a kitchen slave he escapes and ingratiates himself into the royal circle via the Lady Fuchsia, a faintly insane creature with significant eyebrows. Steerpike is aware, as the Earl’s family are apparently not, of the gulf between the rich and the poor in Gormenghast. He tells Fuchsia all about "equality" but we never quite know whether he believes it himself. Does he want to bring down the Earl and his family to give their wealth to the people or to take their power for himself?

Not that it is any great joy being the Earl. Ian Richardson is magnificent as the bored 76^th Earl. His entire life governed by an endless succession of absurd daily rituals read, by Warren Mitchell, from an enormous old book. It brings to mind a line from Yes Minister, "Many many things must be done, but nothing must ever be done for the first time." The rules govern what the Earl must eat for breakfast on any given day of the year. The rules govern what ceremonies he must preside at, what gifts he must give and take and generally allow no time to do anything of value. His only joy comes from his library and that becomes Steerpike’s first target.

The Earl has two sisters – a pair of identical dimwits who spend their entire lives listlessly wishing they were in control rather than their brother. Steerpike quickly uses their impotent envy to his own advantage and convinces them to burn the library to the ground, their being unaware that the Earl and the rest of his family are inside at the time. This dramatic act ensures that we can never have sympathy for Steerpike. He is never the hero of the story as he ought to be. He isn’t fighting a grand crusade for freedom. We’re never allowed to be quite sure what he is fighting for. The destruction of the library merely sends a basically good man insane and leads to his suicide at the beaks of a flock of hungry owls.

All we know is that Steerpike hates Gormenghast. But so too does young Titus. Earl from a very young age he quickly grows to loath the procession of rituals and drudgery that goes with his title. He spends most of his time in his dusty school room, gazing at the mountains which lie beyond even the castle walls, while his school master (Stephen Fry) dozes happily at his desk. Education in Gormenghast rests in the hands of a small group of masters who are as dusty as their classrooms and who seem to know very little about anything. The staff room consists of the likes of Martin Clunes, Steve Pemberton, Phil Cornwell, James Dreyfuss and other well known comedy actors. The headmaster is none other than Spike Milligan and his faithful sidekick and wheelchair pusher is Gregor "Rab C Nesbit" Fisher. In the many school scenes that we watch I don’t remember seeing any actual teaching. Further evidence of the stagnant nature of Gormenghast. It is enough that children go to school because children should always go to school and children always will go to school. That is how it is.

By the final episode Steerpike is quite mad. For seventeen years he has been quietly killing and toying with the Earl’s family. All it has got him is the position of the secretary’s much abused assistant. When he discovers that the secretary has a son to whom he will bequeath his position, Steerpike loses the last of his sanity. He clumsily kills his master by setting fire to his beard. But the hunched old man grabs his lackey and sets him alight too. They fall from the window of the castle down into the moat below, the old man dying and Steerpike emerging as a burned hero. As he lies in his bed he mumbles "the twins make five". His doctor – the huge haired John Sessions – takes this as the final proof of his long standing suspicions of Steerpike. Eventually he is forced out into the open and hunted down like a fugitive.

The castle survives, the family survive, Gormenghast and its traditions survive. Steerpike uses his last stand to tell Gertrude that he should’ve been her son. She agrees with him. Underneath it all she knows that Gormenghast needs to change. Who can say what an earl like Steerpike would’ve done, for good or for evil. But he wouldn’t have settled for the status quo. So she is quietly pleased when Titus announces he is leaving the castle to explore the world beyond. She knows he will return. Perhaps a wiser man for his adventures. Then perhaps some life will be injected into the preserved corpse of Gormenghast. At the very least she has no other children to inherit the Earldom so the reign of the Groan family cannot continue in blind ignorance.

The miniseries, cramming around a thousand pages into four hours, has been criticised as no where near as good as the books. Which is fair enough – compromise always has to be made in these productions. The special effects are variable. Many of the backgrounds are unconvincing but that adds, in a perverse way, to the unrealness of the castle. Certainly no one can accuse the BBC of cutting corners. A cast that includes the likes of Stephen Fry, Christopher Lee, Ian Richardson, Zoë Wannamaker, Richard Griffiths, John Sessions, June Brown, Warren Mitchell, Eric Sykes and many moor is proof that this was a prestige production. Is it a classic? Probably not. But it was a brave production and one which was well worth the considerable effort that went into it.