The document to your left is an annotated reproduction of the chart Alan Moore made during preparation of his unfinished magnum opus Big Numbers. Big Numbers was intended as a 12-part graphic novel series about a writer who returns to her hometown only to find the town and the lives of everyone in it in a state of total upheaval. The story ambitiously intertwines the stories of over forty characters, using fractal mathematics as a grand metaphorical framework on which to hang their chaotic, uncertain lives. Five issues were written, three were drawn, and only two were released to the public. The original chart, completed in August 24th 1988, was finally published in 2011. By studying the chart along with its annotations taken from conversations with Alan Moore himself, taped during pre-production of the ill-fated Big Numbers TV adaptation, we're finally able to see how the entire story would have unfolded in detail.
Each of the 12 columns represents one issue, and each row represents a character, with the table cells telling you exactly what each character would have been doing in each issue. Clicking "notes" will display Alan's description of that scene in this panel.
The original chart that this document was transcribed from has been described as the "Turin Shroud of Comics". It was created by Alan Moore just one year after he finished Watchmen. The story it describes is startlingly prescient, dealing with subject matter that may have felt alien in the 80's, but which went on to dominate the cultural conversation of the decade to come. I hope that this document will reignite interest in this brilliant, unfinished work. All words and pictures are the property of Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz.
This page is intended as a fan tribute to the work of Alan and Bill and contains no data that wasn't already available online. Nonetheless, if you're the copyright holder (i.e., you're Alan and/or Bill) and you'd like me to take this down, let me know at jadthetaff57@gmail.com and I'll happily do it.
If you enjoyed this, support Alan's work by purchasing his novels Voice Of The Fire and Jerusalem, two very good novels which deal with similar territory (that is to say, Northampton). Support Bill's brilliant art by purchasing from his website.
The following is a transcript of taped conversations held between Alan Moore, film producer Alex Usborne, and screenwriter M. J. Basset. This represents perhaps the first thirty of around two hundred and eighty pages of transcripts Basset kept during the preproduction of a proposed Big Numbers TV show. Only these thirty pages were released to the public. Click the links in the text to jump to the relevant points in the chart.
Foreword from Basset's now-defunct homepage, written in December 1999:
"For those of you who don't know, Alan Moore is a graphic novelist. He writes comics. But he's pretty good at it and is very highly regarded by those into comics. Hardly surprising because he's been responsible for some of the most outstanding work in a pretty crowded field. If you want to know more about Alan Moore, then there are plenty of sites out there."
My involvement came about because I was working with a producer called Alex Usborne who had just bought the rights to Irvine Welsh's collection of short stories The Acid House. He was talking to me about directing one of the segments after seeing my short film The Burning. I wasn't a big fan of Welsh's work but was keen to get on board this project. It didn't work out and Alex ended up using one director for the whole deal and it wasn't me."
What he did throw me was a different bone. Alex knew about my interest and knowledge of chaos and quantum theory (as much as any keen layman) and had just negotiated the rights to a series of comics called Big Numbers. I knew nothing about this and to be honest I didn't know who Alan Moore was. I'd been quite into 2000AD and Judge Dredd etc., but that was always through the artwork rather than the stories. Anyway, Alex thought I might be the man to bring Alan's unfinished comic books to the small screen. It requires a pretty good grasp of narrative and a way of making literally dozens of characters all work together."
Big Numbers is kind of a myth in the comic world. It never got finished because the artists all ended up walking out on Alan. He had a very specific vision and is extremely demanding. That said, the few issues that did get published are incredible to look at. Alan always said that this was his masterwork."
It's set in the late 80's in the UK and is about... well, it's very simple. An American company builds a Mall on the edge of the town of Hampton and disrupts the life of everyone involved. That's the pitch, but in reality it's about so much more - it's about madness, the quantum world and chaos theory in everyday life. The huge character base circles around each other, impact, change and move on. It's pretty weird and pretty funny. I describe it as a super-real soap opera."
So I spent long weeks at Alan's house in Northampton going through every detail of the work and characters. He gave me his notes and I saw a comic-book script for the first time. I was just staggered by how huge it was. Hundreds of pages long describing every aspect of every frame of drawings. Much longer than a screenplay and much more detailed. I'm not surprised that artists fled in droves.
Alan is a terrific guy. Big dope smoker and not much disposed to moving out of his comfy armchair. But his mind is wonderful and well worth a visit. We recorded our conversations and I've had them all transcribed. I've now got 280 pages of talking between Alan, myself and the producer shooting the breeze about Big Numbers and other things."
But as things stand, Big Numbers has stalled. I finished my work on it - we've got twelve hour-long episode outlines - and the producer took it to Channel 4 in the UK. They didn't get it. Can you believe that? They don't think there's an audience for it. So we're stalled. Alex is now producing a new movie, I'm trying to finish a couple of new projects and get my own film off the ground and Alan is doing a whole new comic series."
THE TRANSCRIPT.
MICHAEL J BASSET
Well, so each of them has got a story?
ALEX USBOURNE
Maybe if we go through the characters one by one and you tell us where they go and how they…
ALAN MOORE
OK,
AO
Is that alright?
MJB
Well, yeah. Let's give it a whirl.
ALAN MOORE
OK, shall we start with Christine?
AO
Absolutely. Well, she obviously drives everything. What I got from her was that she is coming back for stability, which is the one thing, by the very nature of what you're doing, that you can't have. Because the natural system is chaotic…
ALAN MOORE
And she can't write her book because of that chaos, she'd come back to Northampton for stability but no, she finds everything's in chaos, you know- her friends’ lives, her family’s lives, everything's mad. She can't get into it, she can't make any sense of her own life or the lives of the people around her, enough to get the novel together.
AO
And this is everyday chaos we're talking about here?
ALAN MOORE
Yes, just the everyday chaos.
AO
The shit that we all go through?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, the shit that we all go through. And it's just more extreme than when she was here last time. People are in deeper shit. So, you see her struggling with writing the book, now at the end of it, when she's actually seen all the chaos and stuff, and is actually, she's learnt about the erm, fractal stuff, because she meets Sammy at the end, I'll explain that...
AO
She's met him once-
ALAN MOORE
She's met him once but he actually plays a part in her life which I'll explain in a minute. At the end, when she gets this metaphor that is central to her novel, she sort of sees the... she understands what it meant, and you really end the series with Christine going off to write her novel properly. Because she's got it.
AO
So we can legitimately say this is, this series will be her journey to write her novel.
ALAN MOORE
That's true, she's the point outside, she's the point of identity that's looking at all this and eventually comes to understand the whole picture-
MJB
From a writer’s point of view she's a new character coming in to kickstart it all.
ALAN MOORE
Yes, she's the main character that... I mean, the mall is a character in itself- that's this burgeoning presence of increasing chaos, but she's the character that drives it all...
AO
Now does she ever get back to- I mean she sees a couple of her old friends in the pub, does she have a relationship with Velvet and Barry? I've got down here, well- they're just people that she knows. She sees that their lives are perhaps more badly hurt than anybody else’s because they're poor and they're constantly in the shit with the police and stuff like this, but-
MJB
Barry’s a soft drug dealer?
ALAN MOORE
A soft drug dealer and she uses him to buy a little bit of dope off. Now, erm, Peter Gautrey, she will run into him again but it- that's not a very good relationship because...
AO
Now he was the father of her-
ALAN MOORE
He was the father of her daughter that was aborted. She left Northampton after that. She doesn't even know that he's a policeman. She does at the end of #4. She finds out at the end of #4 that he's a policeman. At the same time he sees her picture in the paper, and you're not sure what his reaction is to it, but... it's something from the past that he'd rather not think about.
AO
I got the impression this guy Peter Gautrey is a wife beater, he's an abuser.
ALAN MOORE
He is. He's scum, he is not a nice guy, but at the end of it, you almost feel quite sorry for him. Because he gets… he loses everything, because his wife, erm, goes mad. You see her, I think in #4- she's talking to Mr. Ironing Board and the curtains and she's just-
MJB
Is that in #4?
AO
Yes, definitely getting a bit loopy, I couldn't work it out-
ALAN MOORE
It goes- she gets madder and madder until... I mean, this happened to my cousin-in-law, who started talking to the ironing board, and talking to the curtains. They were all cartoon characters that were talking to her and her only friends. But she goes completely mad, and her father, Lovelow, realises that when he sees the state she's in, he realises that no, it's not just women being a bit hysterical- she's practically drawing on the wall with her own shit, and he's devastated and realises that Peter has been in a large measure responsible… and Peter is depending upon his father-in-law to get him to the masons, to get the promotions that he's looking for.
AO
And do we ever see him beating her?
ALAN MOORE
Erm, I don't know if you actually... it's more psychological-
AO
It's psychological violence rather than actual violence.
ALAN MOORE
It's just that he's frightening her all the time, and I think that might be better than beating her because... beating her, it's over. It overstates it. I mean if someone's hitting a woman then it's obvious where the audiences’ sympathies are, whereas the more common kind of intimidation without coming to blows, which can be worse, you know... so at the end of it, you've got Peter Gautrey who’s been practically told that “you're never going to get promoted, I'm going to see to it that you're never promoted, you're not going to get into the masons, you're not going to get any money, it's all finished for you”. And you have a bit, I think in the last episode, where Peter Gautrey has to interview Beverly Spitteler, about her crime at the mall, because she has been running a very small commonplace scam there-
AO
Does her husband know about that?
ALAN MOORE
Erm, no he doesn't, but she has been running- I've forgotten the exact details, but it's something where you're collecting... the central mall management, it's very easy for them. They have to collect the rents, or something, from the various shops, or whatever, and it's not a very big fraud, but there's easy ways in which you can have an unnoticeable surplus or whatever that will slip into your account. And she's been doing that, but I gather a lot of mall managers do it because it's just like stealing biros from work, it's no big deal. She hasn't defrauded them out of a couple of million like Sammy has, but she's so mired up in it that it's not easy to explain that. Peter Gautrey is the one who has to interview her, and it's more or less… he's finished, she's finished.
AO
Two sad people coming together.
ALAN MOORE
Two sad people and like, at the end of it, neither of them are honest or decent people, they can't offer each other anything, there's just a sort of moment of bleak understanding between them. He walks off, and at one point he opens up to her and says “it could have all gone so differently for me”. He perhaps mentions that “I once had a girlfriend and she was pregnant”, and then at the end of it you see him walking off across the carpark and the little phantom girl just runs out from the foreground and starts to run after him. He's got custody of the ghost. Christine by this time she hasn't seen the abortion for a few issues, she's got over it. At the end of it, he is left wondering, 'I wonder if I'd stayed with her and we'd had the kid I wouldn't have ended up such a cunt?'
MJB
It's a terrific title, Custody of the Ghost.
ALAN MOORE
Custody of the Ghost... he ends up with custody of the ghost. Now Christine, one of the big things that happens to her, after her and Carrol, who's the mall analyst,
MJB
Mr. Carrol?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, who's actually quite a nice bloke, he's just obnoxious, he's sort of…
AO
I didn't get any nice…
ALAN MOORE
Well, you don't, he's completely horrible and offensive to everybody, but the way I saw him, you know- PJ O'Rourke, or somebody who is a hippy who gave up. I mean PJ O'Rourke, you always get this impression- he was a hippy working for National Lampoon all the way through, and he's a disappointed hippy. When it didn't work out, he thought “fuck it, it was all stupid anyway and I'm going to become a Republican Party reptile, and I'm going to be proud of it and I'm going to say outrageous things about poor people, Mexicans and everybody else”. But under there I get the impression that he's probably a bloke who's disappointed and a bit sad and unhappy, and that's where Carrol is. He's one of these libertarian, right wing-
AO
How... how old would you say he'd be?
ALAN MOORE
He's erm, he's about Christine’s age, 30-ish, sort of 35…
MJB
That indeterminate PJ O'Rourke area, isn't it?
ALAN MOORE
That sort of, yeah, that vague…
AO
But you take PJ as your model for that and-
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, he's younger than PJ O'Rourke, but it's sort of-
AO
And does he have that ferocious intelligence, though?
ALAN MOORE
I think he does, I mean- I think the way that I saw the character developing he is very, very intelligent, he's deliberately obnoxious, erm, it's part of his schtick…
AO
To provoke a response, though?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, a lot of the time. And what happens is him and Christine, when they just happen to bump into each other at the computer counter where Sammy is serving, they get into a row. They hate each other and obvious loathing from first sight. Now what happens is, is that Christine buys a word processor, and she gets the modem to go with it, and she starts to just play around with it, and onto the sort of bulletin boards, and things like that…
AO:
So he didn't like the Internet.
ALAN MOORE
I don't like the Internet, but I researched it with friends and... she gets to meet somebody on the Internet, this bloke, and he seems really nice. His politics seem really similar to hers, and you know, sort of, he seems to be somebody that perhaps has problems expressing himself, but he's a decent bloke, and she's intrigued by this guy and it starts to become quite a relationship, almost.
AO
It's Carrol.
ALAN MOORE
Yeah but it’s... the thing is it's not just that, it's Sammy, who just for the crack, because on the Internet you don't know who you're talking to, he's taking their messages, altering them, and sort of, he's relaying them, to each other's bulletin boards. You know, at each other's message boxes or whatever, just for the crack, because it's obvious they don't like each other. So, he just thinks, because he can-
MJB
Is it Carrol and Christine having the Internet relationship?
ALAN MOORE
They don't know they are. And when they meet, it's complete horror and shock because they start to realise that their messages have been altered, that the descriptions that they've given each other are slightly different. They're not what they'd said, and you know, basically, Carrol's politics- Christine's an anarchist, and he's a libertarian. Those politics are pretty well indistinguishable from each other, it's just one is far right and one is far left, and they sort of meet up round the back, and that was going to be some of the point-
AO
Do they get over the fact that they've been manipulated?
ALAN MOORE
No, they get to a point where they realise they got manipulated and they go looking for Sammy. And this is when they find him and he shows them the Mandelbrot set, and... it's almost mystical, you know, they're almost sitting there holding hands watching it but... they're not going to have a love affair, because that's not the kind of story it is, and so they realise that-
AO
“Nobody gets out of here alive”.
ALAN MOORE
They realise that, though they haven't really got much in common, but they don't hate each other, they realise that there's common ground there. At the end of it he goes off- he's happy, you know, there' s nothing wrong with his life and it's kind of interesting, he's learnt something, you know, both of them have sort of modified their positions and there's something more human for that.
AO
What has he done, I mean, what has he been doing during the course of the-
ALAN MOORE
Well, he's been irritating, erm... I'm just trying to think-
AO
I mean he was the market analyst for the mall, yeah?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, he was the market analyst for the mall, erm, he arrives around Issue 3, doesn't he? And erm-
AO
Yeah, because you've introduced him in #3 but I've only met him from #4, so,
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, I don't think we actually see realise that he's also got an Internet lover, but he does talk about... well there might be somebody, you know, because he could have just met a girl in town. Now I'm just trying to think what happens to Carrol. Erm... that might be one of the ones that I'm a bit blacker on. Leave him for the moment. I know it ends up with him and Christine coming together having this Epiphany at which point Christine misses the mall protest. She's supposed to be there and it's all been building up to that and it all happens and she just forget about it. It just sort of all happens without her, because she’s...
AO
And that's the mall protest where her mum is arrested and...
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, so you'll be cutting between these fractal pictures on the screen that he's showing to her-
AO
Yeah, and moving to large numbers of people-
ALAN MOORE
Yes, and moving to large numbers of people, and it all comes together in that kind of imagery and sort of epiphany. Now, other characters.
AO
Well, we've got Monica Beard.
ALAN MOORE
Monica Beard. Now what happens to her-
AO
So she nicks stuff?
ALAN MOORE
Yes, she nicks stuff. When she goes to the mall-
MJB
Hold it, hold it, we seem to have lost Christine a little bit-
ALAN MOORE
Lost Christine, right. Now Christine, she interacts with all the other characters at various levels. Mr. World is stalking her, she sees her friends Brian and Vicky occasionally, and you see their story working through… she's sort of running round between the other characters, trying to get her novel written, conspicuously failing, getting distracted into this mall protest, you see her do a poetry reading, at a local pub which she is a bit unsure about but it goes OK, and she gets involved in the mall protest, she gets sucked into cast of the town, she's also got this bizarre relationship with somebody that she's never met on the Internet, and that seems to become something...
AO
And does she- well, I mean, how close does she come to getting back together with Peter Gautrey?
ALAN MOORE
She doesn’t. I mean what happens is that when she's with the mall protest committee, they have to talk to the police about the demonstration, and that's the first time she meets him, and it's this very stilted... but there's a lot in it, you know, in the silences, and the stares, and like there's just... it's obvious that there is a yawning gulf between them, you know, that he's gone one way and she's gone another.
ALAN MOORE
And at the end of it the mall has come to Northampton, the protest hasn't functioned, the mall is going to change everything, everything will continue to change, but now Christine has got a handle on it. She's been through all of these mad events, she's had this illusory love affair, she's seen what's happened to her sister and dad, her mother, all of this stuff, and it's been a lesson, and she's got the metaphor to hang it all on, this fractal thing, so she goes off to write Big Numbers, basically. She goes off to write a book about chaos and small towns. And that's her story. I mean there's more to it than that in the details but a lot of it is, she is the threat. You know, so you'll see her moving in amongst the other characters.
AO:
I like her very much. She's dishy and focused and-
ALAN MOORE
Yeah-
AO
And interesting, and-
ALAN MOORE
And she's got a big nose! You know, I like the idea that she won't be photographed in profile. Because she is great looking, but she struck me as somebody who doesn't feel great looking. You know, she thinks that people love her for her mind.
AO
The only thing I was interested in is- how did Audrey and Bobby produce such a smart, sassy daughter?
ALAN MOORE
Well, it's not unknown-
AO
I mean Janice is...
ALAN MOORE
Well, it's not unknown, I mean- you know, my parents were not at all intelligent. They were great people but they had never been educated. It wasn't that they were innately stupid, it was just that they'd never been educated. The class that they came from had to make do, but genetically there was nothing wrong with them, you know, and... and it's not just me, there's lots of others. I mean, my brother, he's a really nice guy and he's not stupid but he's not... let's say, he's not like me. You know, he doesn't use his intellectual-
AO
I was wondering though, if there's one incident which you could cite as having crushed her beyond the horizon that was, I mean- was she writing before she got pregnant?
ALAN MOORE
I should imagine it would be the writing.
AO
Yeah, but was she writing before she got pregnant-
ALAN MOORE
Oh yeah, she's always been writing, I should imagine that... you see the scenes of her being a loud and difficult teenager in the 60s, and these cliched arguments that you had with your parents in the 60s, she would have got swept up in all that. She would have seen herself as a poet. Probably a beat poet, you know, 10 years too late or whatever, that's what drove her as much as anything. Because in the 60s lots of opportunities suddenly blossomed out that hadn't been there before, and that was the cause of a lot of the generation gap then. You've got kids growing up to parents who’d... you know, the early years of this century were dark, claustrophobic years, and that's where most of what my parents grew up, and that world was still around in the 50s when I was growing up. But the 60’s happened and it... yeah, “we could go to the moon, we can be pop stars, we can do anything”, you know, and I think that yeah, that sort of made her like that. Whereas Janice was always the more conventional quiet child who just wanted to do what everybody else was doing.
AO
She's the younger daughter, younger sister, isn't she?
ALAN MOORE
Younger sister, yeah, and she's the quiet, conventional one and she just wants to do what everybody else is doing so she's not being left out.
MJB
I was intrigued where to go now, whether to go round Christine Gathercole's family or to move on to… maybe it's Christine, Sammy and Carrol, there is one bit I think-
AO
Well I mean, you conspicuously say to Bill in your notes that the first time the three principle characters meet is when Sammy, Carrol and Christine buy the computer.
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, because the thing with Carrol that you're going to see is his reactions. Basically he starts to realise, as the market analyst, he starts to realise that he cannot do his job properly. He's looking at it and he realises that you can't analyse a situation that is this chaotic. He's looking... he hadn't realised that things were quite like this in England.
AO
He's American?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, he's American. They're all Americans that have been brought over.
MJB
Maybe if we begin by going from the story of the mall, starting there and going that way in.
ALAN MOORE
OK, well-
AO
Stephen Judge is the architect?
ALAN MOORE
Yes. The land belonged to Andrew Lovelow. It was his... now, his father owned it, his father was a traditional farmer- no, his father didn't own it, what it was was that Roy Measures the councillor gave Andrew Lovelow a tip-off that this land would probably be sold off. This scrubland in a few years’ time would probably be earmarked for perhaps some sort of... and so they've done a cosy little deal between the two of them. Andrew Lovelow has bought the scrubland for peanuts and then has sold it off, abut he feels a bit bad about that, because his dad wouldn't have done that, his dad didn't see land as something to just make money by selling.
AO
Less a commodity, more a...
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, and there's still part of Lovelow which feels some kind of guilt. Perhaps because of his relationship with his father who he always admired, and that will contribute to when he sees what a mess he's made of his daughter's life as well. At the end, that will add up to it. Now, OK, so he's sold the land to this American company. You never see the head of the company. You get to see him where he's obviously in the office but you never see him. It's not important who he is, he's just the human entity at the head of the corporation. They get the architect in... now the mall’s architecture is horrible, it's that kind of architecturally arrogant sort of horrendousness. It's like he's got all this bullshit theory about what it represents, but people are going to have to live in it and work in it and sort of see it every day.
AO
Is that the architectural arrogance that came from the 70’s and 80’s?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, that's it, and he's very much that-
MJB
Is that the architect- is that Stephen Judge?
ALAN MOORE
Yes, that's Stephen Judge. The architect. Stephen Judge and his wife Delia. Yeah, Stephen Judge, Delia's English-
AO
Yeah, we got that, Delia's English.
ALAN MOORE
Delia's English, she's been living in California for years. She's coming back to England and she doesn't know what quite what to expect. She's surprised when she sees the horror of it, you know, erm...
AO
That's rich for someone who's been in California, isn't it?
ALAN MOORE
Well yeah, but I mean she's got... she's developed a kind of nostalgia for England that sort of-
AO
That's typical ex-pat behaviour isn't it?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, but when she gets back here... no, it's not like that. The mall, it develops pretty much the way a building would develop- the actual physical mall itself. You go through the various stages. You seem them and the first surveyors, with Christine walking across the middle, and they’re working by floodlight, and all these surveyors, the marchers. And then you see there's work on the building site, and in the next issue you see people starting to... the builder, Colin Wordsworth, he gets the job on the building site, you see that the Vicar is going to have the light from his lovely Vicarage completely blotted out by- you start to see the building work sort of commence. There's the RENT BOY, getting some trade from the next issue, he's getting some trade from up on the building site, and... so it's effecting everybody, and then the company's starting to move in employing people, interviewing people, that's when Mr. Killingback gets... it goes through all the normal stages of a mall development would do until the opening when you've got the protest, and that goes...
AO
Is there any ongoing protest at the building site itself?
ALAN MOORE
Well, not a protest at the building site I don't think. It's probably more like angry letters. There might be some towards the end, but it will start off with angry letters to the papers, a public campaign, sort of, erm...
AO
Newspaper-driven campaign.
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, newspaper-driven campaign, and with a pressure group sort of giving press releases to the newspapers, trying to organise it, you know. It's pretty well doomed before it starts, because the building's going up... you know there's also the possibility that it... now did I say at one point that it was land that could have conceivably gone towards something more community-spirited? And yeah, I've forgotten the exact details of that, but maybe the protesters are asking for more community access to the mall, areas that would be just pure community. But... so that's the story of the mall. The story of the mall is the story of the people who work there. That is the Spittelers, the Judges, and Carrol. Now Carrol has got problems with the chaos of not being able to... you know, the protesters, things that he hadn't really reckoned with.
AO
Does he ever come across a moral conscience, when he’s... presumably part of his market analysis will be how it's going to affect the town as it stands, and the mall is going to end up closing a load of small businesses.
ALAN MOORE
Well, I mean, he starts to understand this and yeah, he does have-
AO
Does he become more moral?
ALAN MOORE
He does become moral. I mean it's clear from his point of view, but you know, he is a genuine Libertarian in that he believes in the free market but he also doesn't necessarily believe that people should be stamped into the ground by giant monopolies. So he's got some conflict of interest politically but then there's this sort of love affair, this ghostly love affair that he's having with this woman on the Internet and who he doesn't know.
ALAN MOORE
And eventually with Sammy and Christine, they're the ones who come to this kind of epiphany at the end, that's the sense in that they're the three main characters. They're the only three who understand the whole thing. They've stepped outside the story almost and can see this whole... pattern spreading in front of them just in this moment ‘round his house. But you know they may well have... I was going to perhaps have them taking drugs when they were round there. That was a possibility because that's something that all three of them would have in common, acid or ecstasy or something like that.
ALAN MOORE
But the other characters... now Paul and Beverley Spitteler they- you realise quite early on that she is awful, she is a monster, she is ruthlessly ambitious, she covers it up with this plastic barbie doll sweet veneer, which is irritating. Her and her husband, it's a marriage of convenience really, it was better for both of their careers that they were married-
AO
Is Paul Spitteler about to have a relationship with Kevin Sorry?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, I mean, like then you have them meet-
AO
I like that scene a lot.
ALAN MOORE
In the street and sort of, and he starts to become more and more fascinated with him and eventually they do have a relationship. He leaves, he quits his job, because it's all too much for him, it's sort of, he doesn't want to be part of the mall erm, and I think probably he ends up with Kevin Sorry because it's Kevin Sorry's story as well. But, I'll get onto that in a minute. I'll keep with the Spittelers. Beverley Spitteler, she's horrified by English life on the estate that she finds herself on. There's the three kids, who- their terror campaign escalates over the...
AO
These are the Wordsworth kids?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, the ones who throw the stones through the train window in the first issue-
AO
Damien, Sigourney and-
ALAN MOORE
And William Henry, he's the baby. I think she explains at one point that the first one was named after the Omen, the second one was named after Aliens 2 and the third one was named after the royal baby. Both the royal babies because he was a contraceptive failure as well, so their terror campaign is hitting, they're into firebombing by issue four-
AO
Yeah, we see them draining petrol out of cars-
ALAN MOORE
You see that in issue two, don't you, where they're draining the petrol.
AO
And they motivated themselves against Sammy, as well.
ALAN MOORE
And well, again, there are kids up on the eastern district... there were the Blackthorn firebombers who were all about ten. And their vandalism is getting more and more probably impossibly extreme as the thing goes on. You get the impression that by the end of it they might even blow up the mall. They might have got into explosives by then.
ALAN MOORE
Now Beverley is- she's determined to dominate this landscape, and she finds it increasingly hard to do until this horrific moment when she suddenly realises that there's this, I don't know, 1.5 million unexplained gap in the profits, and that yes, she has been doing this little scam but unfortunately the little scam makes it look like she's been doing the big scam as well, and it's difficult to... there’s also the fact that her husband's going spending more time away, she's been covering up for that because she wouldn't want her marriage to look bad professionally. But by the end of it her career's finished, she ends up in this little bleak police interrogation room with Peter Gautrey, both of them staring into this grey expanse for the rest of their lives.
ALAN MOORE
The Judges are the most interesting, what happens to them. Now Delia, because she hasn't got much to do, she actually volunteers for something called a “keeper" scheme. Which is something that volunteers can do that people who have been let out of prison. The social services can arrange for them to have a “keeper" scheme, where if they're seeing a parole officer there is an ordinary citizen in the community who you will go and visit and who will come and visit you and who will be your friend. Not an official parole officer but they'll be reporting on you and stuff like that. So Gravie O'Dedra, who's the social worker for Monica Beard, I think she's also been called around to the Judges’ because Delia has got so worried about her kids’ increasingly strange behaviour, which is mainly to do with the “Real Life” roleplaying game. Delia is frightened by the England that she finds herself in, and it's really her who's having the problems. The social worker realises that it's more mum's problem than the kids and suggests that maybe this “keeper" scheme would give her something to do, a focus…
ALAN MOORE
Now Monica is a bit despondent because she's been and looked at the new mall and the security is so tight, it's all futuristic. She's been in jail for a year or whatever it is, 18 months, and everything's moved on. The security is much tighter, she doesn't know whether she's going to be able to hack it anymore, so she's looking at a kind of redundancy, the mall is affecting her lot as well. Now she gets on this “keeper" scheme with Delia, and they both like a drink, and they get on really well, they get on like a house on fire, and Monica tells Delia all these stories about crime- these fantastic anecdotes and most of which are real ones that I've got.
ALAN MOORE
There's some guy I knew that had been arrested for shoplifting, went into the shop after that and the store detectives hung around near him. So one day he went in there with this enormous sort of bag, and was just hanging round suspiciously unzipping the bag knowing that the store detectives were watching him. On the way out they said “we'd like you to come to the office”, and he said “why?”, and they said “we have reason to believe that you have stolen, come through to the office”, so he goes through and they say “right, what have you got in that bag” and he says “you don't want to open that”. And they said, “what have you got in that bag?”, and he said “I’m sorry, you don't want to open that”. And they said “we're going to have to open it ourselves”, so he said “well, you can if you want, but you don't want to open that bag”. They said “well, we'll be the judge of that”, and they unzipped it and this 15 foot anaconda came out and apparently one of the guys ran over the other guy’s head trying to get out of the door.
ALAN MOORE
But anecdotes like that are.. this is marvellous for Delia. This is something real, and crude and raw and dangerous. She's talking to Monica and she can understand exactly why Monica steals things, because Monica likes caviar and things like that, and “well if I couldn't afford it I suppose I'd steal it too, because I quite like it”, you know. And Monica talks about how her main worry- it’s security, and at this point Delia who's the wife of the architect starts to sort of think “well actually, I know, I've got the plans to the whole thing, I know all the blind spots, and all the design”. So basically what happens is Delia ends up as part of a shoplifting ring with Monica, who’s... Delia's the brains behind it. Delia and Monica are in partnership just running this great shoplifting ring.
ALAN MOORE
The children, now you see them, they're starting to play this game called Real Life-
AO
Yeah, this for me was just brilliant.
ALAN MOORE
Which is simple and horrible and they roll these three characters. The youngest boy is a working class girl, the rich over-achieving Tiffany, the daughter, she's this black girl and the heavy metal prick becomes quite a white capitalist very rich boy. And you see all of the kids are starting to change according to their roles in the game. The youngest kid, eventually you see him starting to dress up in his mum's clothes because he really likes being a girl. Ronnie, the brash, heavy metal one, he enrolls in a business studies class and you realise that he's got a lot of potential. He doesn't want to blow all this. And Tiffany, when Gravie, the social worker comes to see them, she sees that the kids are a bit weird, because Tiffany keeps referring to her as “sister”, and identifying with her as another coloured woman even though Tiffany is white. Tiffany is getting the sort of “I want to be black” thing, and she starts hanging out with some of the black guys on the mall and wearing the dreads and some of it will be the black drug dealers who you've seen in pubs and hanging round Christine's and she's in with them.
ALAN MOORE
Ronnie has become this fascist industrialist at the age of about 17 and.. and Stephen Judge is totally unaware of all this, because he doesn't even notice his family, there's bits where he talks about his family as being “architectured” as well, he sees that as being a statement of what kind of guy he is, and you have him going on about that kind of thing. Everything in his life is perfect, the aesthetics of life, he's got a lovely looking wife, he's got the three kids, everything's great, big house, and so at the end of it you see him faced with the fact that- I think at the end of it when he realises what's happened to his family, he realises that the mall is actually- he has this sort of epiphany where he suddenly sees that it's all a high sham.
AO
Yeah, made him stand back and like the mall's finished and he looks at it and you see his face ,and he's thinking, it's the end and you think-
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, it's all shit, it’s- all of them, all of the American people are almost changed ’til practically destroyed by coming here, but the mall continues. You've got a lot of people moved in- Mr. Killingback is moving into a more responsible position by the day. It doesn't make much difference that you've got a psychotic in charge, because the bureaucracy is what's really running things. So that's the mall, the staff. That's what mostly happens to them.
MJB
Quite a lot, at the mall, a lot of action at the mall.
AO
The mall is the thing.
(N.B. Alex leaves the room)
ALAN MOORE
It's all weaving around. The characters that are connected with them, say Kevin Sorry, he's the rent boy, now-
MJB
He seemed like, I mean they seemingly introduce him in the DHSS, he's got a nice line there-
ALAN MOORE
He's a nice guy, he's funny and he's HIV positive…
MJB
Right I think I'm going to get that in, right, so Paul ends up HIV positive-
ALAN MOORE
Well no, Paul doesn't because they use safe sex and Kevin tells him. But Kevin doesn't tell everybody, because Kevin doesn't really give much of a fuck, because what's society ever done for him? And you'll see there are a lot of sociopathic rent boys around Northampton. They're not bad kids but they've got HIV, they've been screwed by businessmen, they don't feel a great debt to society,
MJB
They use it as a weapon to a certain extent.
ALAN MOORE
But you have a scene where Colin Wordsworth and some of his mates beat the shit out of Kevin Sorry just outside a pub, and you also find out a little bit after that that the bite marks that Colin has gone to the doctors for, they're sarcoma. Colin's HIV, and all of his mates think that he must be a poof because only poofs catch it. His wife knows where he got it because he's going out to prostitutes a lot of the time, he's using a lot of prostitutes. She throws him out, he can't get a job because he's HIV positive and people won't employ him, and he ends up drinking devastated down the pub, and Kevin Sorry's down there and he's really frightened when he sees him but he doesn't recognise Kevin Sorry and he just starts pouring out...
(NB Alex re-enters the room.)
ALAN MOORE
I'm just saying that Colin Wordsworth, the builder, the purple bite marks that he's down the hospital for are sarcoma. He's HIV positive.
AO
Colin Wordsworth?
ALAN MOORE
Colin Wordsworth goes to prostitutes because, he's doing a lot of whoring-
AO
Were you going to draw any parallels… because Peter Gautrey is abusive to his wife in a psychological way, were you going to go for Colin Wordsworth as a more physical abuser?
ALAN MOORE
I don't even... well you probably would, but-
AO
Because he seems like the guy who would really do it.
ALAN MOORE
But his wife's horrible as well,
AO
Well, that doesn't justify it!
ALAN MOORE
It doesn't justify it but, yeah, I can see that there probably would be physical stuff in it. I should imagine that she probably wouldn't be that reluctant to slug him, or something. It might come to violence, it's one of them Mike Leigh kind of relationships where there’s... it's like he's weak, he shouts a lot, he's a bully, and the final scene with him will be where he's in the pub, he doesn't recognise Kevin Sorry as the person that he's beaten up a few months before. Kevin Sorry recognises him, but doesn't say anything, and he starts pouring out his problems, saying that he's got AIDS. “I’m not a poof! No disrespect, no disrespect, I'm not a poof”, but he's got it and he doesn't know what he's going to do, and his wife's thrown him out and he hasn't got a job and you just end up with... Kevin Sorry just puts his arm around him, this bloke’s passed out drunk and Kevin Sorry just sits there with his arm round him.
ALAN MOORE
And the other bit with Kevin Sorry is that you see Brian Slow, the teacher, all the way through-
MJB
I couldn't figure where you were going with this guy.
ALAN MOORE
Well, it's all fallen to bits for him as well. All the way through he’s been talking about how the thing that really justifies his life to him is that just once in a while you'll get one student that you'll know that you've really talked to. He feels a bit compromised because he used to be a socialist, and you can't be a socialist and a teacher at the same time. You can't say anything about the conservative government, you can't do any of that. He feels a bit compromised but he can still justify it all because just occasionally there’ll be some kid who really listens, and he talks about “this one kid, Kenny something-or-other, who was... and that kid, can't remember his name, that was the one, he was brilliant”, and he'll keep bringing this kid up, as almost like a Talisman whenever he's doubting his own worth.
MJB
His mantra.
ALAN MOORE
“This one kid, and he was top of the class in history, he was brilliant,” and later on you see him meet Kevin Sorry in the street and you realise no, it's not Kenny, it's Kevin, that Kevin Sorry was the kid and after a bit of misunderstanding the bloke realises that the kid's a rent boy, and he says “but… but why are you a rent boy?” And he says 'well you know, all I was good at was history, it was either this or be a history teacher’. And that's the devastation of Brian Slow.
ALAN MOORE
His wife, Vicky, has become a compulsive shopper. She's the mall. Malls send people a bit mad.
One of the programmes that I watched, there was a brilliant Equinox programme about malls, some years ago when I was researching Big Numbers, and it was talking about the different kind of social phenomena that cluster around malls. The mall rats, you know, which I guess is what Tiffany becomes.
MJB
Does she become like that despite the fact that she's turning into, er-
ALAN MOORE
Well, yes, she becomes a sort of rasta moll, you know, she'll soon be talking in Jamaican patois and-
MJB
Does she make any contact with Sammy?
ALAN MOORE
She might well do, I mean- they could very well meet if she's hanging out at the mall. Some of the scenes I was just, you know, I haven't got every scene worked out. I've worked them out as I've got to them, but yeah, she could very well have met Sammy.
ALAN MOORE
Now what happens to Vicky Slow, is that she becomes- one of the things that happens in malls is that you get people who are driven berserk by all of that tempting needless luxury, especially if they've got a bit of plastic, and this is what happens to Vicky. I think she also has an affair with somebody from the mall as well because she’s drinking a lot, she's spending a lot of money. Her husband doesn't realise this. He doesn't realise that she's spent all their money, until it all comes to... I think perhaps he has to go and pick her up from the mall because they've cut her credit cards in half or whatever, and she is still in trouble and you have this bit where you suddenly realise his life has fallen apart as well, this chaos is everywhere.
AO
Brian looks like he's going to have a nervous breakdown from the word go.
ALAN MOORE
Well, the reason Brian's there is because as a history teacher he gives another layer of depth to the story, because he's talking about the history of the town and progress and all this sort of stuff. So he's got an overview of history but he doesn't know what's happening right now, he can't see what's happening in his own family. He's more or less given up on that, too complex. And history’s a kind of safe retreat for him, and you've got the flashbacks where it was him and Vicky and Christine and Peter. When they were all young druggies drinking down at the pub, and that gives a sort of poignant context to what happened to all of them later. All this radical talk and they ended up as teachers and policemen and housewives. Christine's the only one who's really got anything of that stuff left, even if she is in a terrible mess.
MJB
What's the deal with their son Aidan? Who's a horrible animal torturer?
ALAN MOORE
Erm, he's not important, I mean he's just a horrible animal torturer.
AO
I didn't catch Aidan-
MJB
He's strangling a cat at one point.
ALAN MOORE
Two kids, yeah. He’s just one of those ordinary, animal torturer kids. An amoral child. I think there are two of them.
MJB
We can give him enough characteristics to give him a profile of the serial killer.
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, give him that bed-wetting stuff, starting fires, you know-
MJB
...potato and a couple of scenes from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs-
ALAN MOORE
Yeah that's always a good one, and Jodie Foster- but where were we? Now, we were talking about the...
MJB
Brian and his relationship with the fact that Christine was the only person who-
AO
Does Christine track them down and they meet?
MJB
Christine has already phoned Vicky.
ALAN MOORE
She's phoned Vicky and in #3 there's a bit where they have a dinner and the kids are doing something bizarre over in the corner with Power Rangers and they're having this conversation- I forget how it goes, it's in there, but he's talking about the past of Northampton and you get the impression that Delia is incredibly bored with it but he doesn't realise, and Christine's talking about her own problems with readjusting to Northampton life stuff and it all makes some kind of sense together...
MJB
How does Delia come to be there?
ALAN MOORE
Oh sorry, not Delia- Vicky, Vicky, sorry, sorry.
AO
You've got to watch that, haven't you?
ALAN MOORE
Got to watch that, yeah, yeah. Vicky, and-
MJB
Let's say Vicky is the compulsive shopper who runs out of money. You say “Delia”- would Vicky then go and get involved with Delia's shoplifting? To continue her need for-
ALAN MOORE
It's possible that could happen, or she might have just done it as a maverick, a freelancer, and that's why she's not very good at it. Her middle-class life falls to bits and so does Brian’s, but that might not be a bad thing for them. And then at the end of it he's broke and he also realises that his life is empty. He's met Kevin Sorry by this point. He realises that the “Kenny” thing was just a delusion, he didn't help anyone, he didn't contribute anything. And when you see him and his wife get back together in the rubble of their relationship, the way I meant to leave that was so you got an idea that this might not be a bad thing, that they might have needed all that stuff pulling down to have a chance at something that was real.
ALAN MOORE
Now, who else have we got?
MJB
Well, we've got Hilary Wordsworth.
AO
Just on this subject of the history business with Brian Slow? That is- it's fairly important, isn't it? I mean there's quite a lot of time about Northamptonshire and the history of Northamptonshire and it must somehow connect with the mall.
ALAN MOORE
Well I mean, they'll be just bits of Northampton history that will be dropped in. The individuals that used to come from Northampton, the insurrection, the gunpowder plot, things like that. There's not really any protest now, but it used to be you could hardly drop a hat without having someone pulled out to the market square. This was in the 1900’s or the 1800’s when there was a riot- I mean, it happened quite a lot. The town is famously insurrectionist going right the way back to... it's always caused a lot of trouble. Plots against the king, that sort of thing-
AO
Troublemaking?
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, but not now. It's how the book put it. People don't really cause as much trouble now. So there's those historical aspects, there's also the commerce of Northampton- it was a boot and shoe town. We used to get really rich during all the wars. All the boots people died in, we made. Then what happened was that the boot and shoe trade died out. Northampton is now... it's like Barclaycard and Carlsberg are the main employers. Even they're laying off. I mean, these are perfect... you know, the lager lout and the credit casualty. These are our main exports.
ALAN MOORE
And now, in the area of land that I originally imagined the mall being put up in, since I wrote Big Numbers- or started to write it- there's now not one mall, but a conglomerate of Toys ‘R’ Us, all the big warehouses, and it occupies exactly the same space that I'd imagined for Big Numbers. And that's one of the biggest overshadowing industries in the town, it's making a lot of difference to all the shops and things like that. So all of the historical aspects of Northampton do have relationship to the stuff that's going on, you know. The fact that the mall represents some new form of American commerce squatting on the rest of the county. And you've got the contrast between these quite powerful and dignified noble historical figures- you know, Boadicea is buried in Northamptonshire- and the paucity, the smallness of modern life. So this could all be stuff that could give things to play off of.
AO
What about the Gathercoles, should we-
MJB
-Return to the Gathercole's, yes, that might be a good idea.
ALAN MOORE
Now, Audrey, she's been laid off at the occupational therapists. I think she was probably more of a dinner lady or something like that at the occupational therapy wing, which has been closed down. And funnily enough, the one in Northampton was closed down about two months after the first Big Numbers came out. It was just obvious that it was happening. Now, she's not a major active character. She does get involved. She's got to fend off Bobby who starts to be making more advances to her. There’s her covert relationship with Gladys Faultless which the reader probably doesn't realise for a while. There's a bit in #3 where you see a shot of the house and you can only hear their word balloons, coming from upstairs first then coming downstairs, and then Gladys Faultless leaves, but they've been upstairs for a quick one. It's not made clear but you gradually get the idea that there's something going on between them.
ALAN MOORE
Now Audrey at the end of it, she moves in with Gladys Faultless. Her and Bobby, that's not going to happen. Christine has moved out again. Audrey, she doesn't haven't a lot to do in the story, she's just there, she’s the mum and she gets involved in the mall protest and you see it's affecting her life as well. I wish I'd got that fucking chart!
ALAN MOORE
Now the end of her bit would be after the incident at the protest where Gladys Faultless has saved her from the police, or at least made the attempt to. Audrey, you know she's a very conservative- well, not Conservative, but traditional working-class woman, but she becomes slowly radicalised through the story, in the way that some old women do, ones that have respected authority all their lives and then realise that the policemen are rude these days, younger and ruder, and some of the politicians aren't very nice, and perhaps they have been screwed. And so, Audrey comes out of it quite well.
MJB
There has to be some sort of positive effects to some of the characters.
ALAN MOORE
Oh yes, she finds herself, moves in with Gladys Faultless, everything's dandy. Now Vicky,
AO
What, Vicky? Or Jan?
ALAN MOORE
Jan, Sorry, yeah, keep picking me up on that. Now, Janice, she has been engaged to Keith Peach. The lorry driven by Kevin Pittock has gone over his side of the car,
AO
Whilst Jan was in the car?
ALAN MOORE
I think Jan was in the car with him at the time, there's a reference to it, but she's alright. She's not got a lot to her, Janice, she's a very shallow person, but she's one of those efficient shallow people. She was going to pack him in that week, but then he got crushed by the car and was in a coma.
MJB
I love that dilemma.
ALAN MOORE
She couldn't pack him in then so she's thinking perhaps I'll wait till he comes round then pack him in, because no one will think the worse of her then.
AO
So she's just waiting, in a way?
ALAN MOORE
She's just waiting, and also there's no guarantee that he is ever going to die or come round. She's upset about it because she wants what all of her friends have got. She wants to be married, and stuff like that, and there'll be a bit where she goes round, because she is actually an old school friend of Hilary Wordsworth, and there was going to be a bit where she goes round to see the Wordsworths, and Colin Wordsworth is just sitting there in front of the telly not speaking to anybody and Hilary talks to him and he doesn't reply but that's how they live. And you've got Janice suddenly realising that actually having a husband who is in a coma probably won't make that much difference, really. And you see her, when she's got this idea, you see her talking to people in the hospital and they say they've got no objections to her bringing in a few bits of her own furniture, you know- a nice comfortable chair, perhaps some pictures for the walls, a television if she wants to watch one, and so you see that Janice starts to move into this married relationship, she feels quite happy now, because-
MJB
Because she does have what her friends have.
ALAN MOORE
She's got the same. She's got a comatose husband that she can sit and watch telly with, she talks to him he doesn't answer, and it's quite blissful. The way I was going to end it with Janice was that I thought of- and this was only an afterthought, and I wasn't decided upon it- but I thought that perhaps that one way to end it would be that she's there, talking to Keith and you just see her face suddenly- her eyes wide- it's just this "Keith!” and you don't know- has he opened his eyes? Has he died? And leave it there. You don't know, but obviously having a live husband will change this blissful set-up that she's got with this perfect half-dead husband. So that's what happens with Janice. And you see all of these people in their various jobs interacting, because Janice works down the DHSS-
MJB
Yes, she meets Kevin Sorry, and Mr. Killingback, and all of that-
AO
And did she set Mr. Killingback up with the job at the mall?
ALAN MOORE
Erm, well yeah, she thoughtlessly just said ‘Oh, I suppose you could go along for that one' or whatever, you know... if that's still how they do it these days, is it?
MJB
Yeah.
ALAN MOORE
It's been a long time since I was-
MJB
Another thing you do with all this that I quite like is that you go for chaos theory, but round the emotions they've got that molecule of banging up each other [??], I don't know if you've tried to incorporate that into it?
ALAN MOORE
Well, the teacup, the swirling teacup, all of that is chaotic... the emotions are chaotic, it's something that is perfectly orderly on a high level of complexity, which is what all of this is about. You'll see this knock-on, this domino rally effect almost. There's things that happen that don't seem to have great significance, but they are going to have a big impact in other peoples' lives.
ALAN MOORE
Now I'm just trying to think, there's got to be a lot of other characters, that we've not even begun to-
AO
Alan, there's quite a lot, what about Bobby?
ALAN MOORE
Well the main thing with Bobby is you'll see his hopeless pathetic plan to get Audrey back, which is mainly to get himself a good smart job and he's not got a clue, and his letters to Charles Bronson and his other bits of eccentric behaviour. He's not an easy guy to get along with and he's got a lot wrong with him. What basically happens to him is, the climax of his story is that at the mall protest, where it comes to it and he hasn't got the bottle, much as he's got this fantasy... there's a bit where he says to Charles Bronson, 'I sometimes wish that my wife and daughters would be raped and murdered. And I don't mean that in an unpleasant way, but it must be great having something to take vengeance on'.
AO
Have a vendetta on.
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, have a vendetta on. And it's his fantasy, you know.
MJB
And he's getting the opportunity and he doesn't take it.
ALAN MOORE
He's given the opportunity, and he's run through similar fantasies in his head, you know, sort of crack barons threatening to rape and murder Audrey but he comes and pulls out his guns and blows-
MJB
Oh, I see, so Bronson and the mall protest have a connection.
ALAN MOORE
Yeah, they've got a connection, well, that's what I tried to do, to make it so that every point was connected to every other point. Now the Vicar, now what happened to the Vicar? Now he has a-
AO
Tony Warboys.
ALAN MOORE
Now I think he goes to, at one point-
MJB
He's presumably part of the protest mob?
ALAN MOORE
He is part of the protest and he ends up having a complete crisis of faith. Well partly there's one part where he's round there to visit Sammy's dad, Healdie, he actually sees some of Sammy's fractal stuff, and Sammy talking about some of this Richard Dawkins stuff, the blind watchmaker, and this Vicar has never thought about this before. It shakes him.
MJB
But he's tied in with the land, the mall? Because his view is messed up by it.
ALAN MOORE
His view is messed up by it, that's a minor irritation. I mean, basically, he's useless, he starts to realise that he's useless-
AO
Is he C of E or Catholic?
ALAN MOORE
He's C of E, I think. I haven't thought of the denomination, but I've seen him in my head as being C of E. Could be Catholic if you like, I hate Catholics more than C of E. Now as the chaos in the town ensues and as he meets the various characters, his faith in it all is shaken and his bland assurances, he doesn't believe them. Nobody else does. By the end of it, if I remember rightly, he has practically hung up his dog collar, but he's got the opportunity to actually go round and talk to people as a person.
AO
So he becomes human.
ALAN MOORE
He becomes human. I was going to have a bit with perhaps Monica Beard or Gladys Faultless, where he goes round to see them and they say “well you didn't listen, you just wanted to talk to us about God. If you want to come in and have a cup of tea, fine, and we'll have a talk, but listen”, and yeah, he becomes a human. He starts to see that maybe that's what he should have done all along, rather than trying to come up with some quote from the bible that would justify everything that was happening to them, because when it starts happening in his life he starts to realise that he hasn't got much faith, that nobody has got any faith in him and-
MJB
Hand-me-down faith from God.
ALAN MOORE
That's right, he's not even sure that God's there anymore. It might all just be numbers. Blind mathematics.
MJB
Have you read Contact by Carl Sagan?
ALAN MOORE
No.
MJB
Because I read that as I was starting to look at Big Numbers and I thought, 'bloody hell, that's amazing’.
ALAN MOORE
Why, is it similar?
MJB
It's Carl Sagan. It's just being made into a movie by Robert Zemeckis at the moment.
ALAN MOORE
Maybe this random mathematics- maybe there is a pattern to it.
AO
I'm very uncomfortable with the purity of mathematics. I like genetics and physics but as soon as you get to mathematics, I'm thinking, whoa, no...
ALAN MOORE
It's spooky stuff, you know.
MJB
Have you read any Roger Penrose? I was ploughing through that and I got to the chapters where he said “these are the easy chapters”…
ALAN MOORE
I mean, I just get to the bits that I can understand and absorb, the bits I can’t...
MJB
I mean, all the algebra and-
ALAN MOORE
…I’m lost, I'm lost. I mean, there's better ones for talking about fractals and stuff. Make it a lot clearer.
The thing is Sammy is basically a pop science buff so anything that is related to that, he can say it. It's mainly the fractal thing that fascinates him, and you'll see that, and that is the central metaphor slowly revealed. I think it's the encounter with Sammy that most shakes the Vicar-
MJB
I'm just trying to work out how long to actually dramatise that, because looking at it on its own, you’re just like “that's a pretty pattern...”
ALAN MOORE
Well, it will be more in what Sammy's saying and talking about, and the conversation between him and the Vicar. Would the Vicar say “but surely, look at this wonderful world of ours, does that not suggest that there must have been a God to design it?”. You know, the “argument from design”, the watchmaker thing. If you find a perfect wristwatch it must have had a designer, and isn't nature perfect? So that must have a designer too. And Sammy says 'well, not necessarily’. And you could give him the chess board game, the Game Of Life, where you just have the chess board and you say 'right, these are the rules’. I'd have to find out what the rules are, but it's something like “if you've got two pieces together of one colour you would put another one on it, or if it's another arrangement, you take one off” and you throw the pieces round and round the board, and apply these simple rules, and within a couple of moves, it's all starting to fall into perfect floral patterns and pieces that are moving in a perfectly mathematical fashion. And Sammy says 'you know, you only need simple start conditions, you don't need God'. You need simple start conditions. And the Vicar hasn't got an answer for it. You have this certainty that the Vicar has never really questioned because he's been avoiding actually looking much at the world. He doesn't listen to people, he's just got his set of answers that he knows he's going to give them whatever, and they're no good anymore.
MJB
That's the problem with religion as a whole, isn't it?
ALAN MOORE
It's dogma and it takes no account of the fact that this week is not the same as last week.
MJB
It takes no account of the facts.
ALAN MOORE
Well yeah, so that's how the Vicar falls to bits, and eventually, I mean none of these stories are big ones...
AO
Thank god, because I don't know how we'd get them all in(!).
ALAN MOORE
A lot of them, you only see them in tiny little bits, but they make up a mosaic, and something has happened to all of the characters in the meantime.
MJB
What happens to Healdie?
ALAN MOORE
Healdie, now what happens to him...
AO
I agree with you in a sense- they are all kind of small stories but I mean... even the Vicars', you know, he's having a crisis of faith and in one of those scenes that's what happens to him. I know in the one sense it's only a small little story, but for fuck’s sake!
ALAN MOORE
Well, that's it. I want them all to be stories that have power, but they're all just incidental. Now Healdie,
MJB
Let's take Healdie and Sammy.
ALAN MOORE
Let's go for Healdie . Healdie's wife was a white woman. She died of leukaemia, she wasn't very nice, she made Healdie painfully aware throughout their relationship that she'd been ostracised from her family for having a black baby. Then she got God, and it all got even worse. She'd say that God and Jesus had forgiven Healdie for being black, basically.
MJB
Do we see Healdie's wife in it other than flashbacks?
ALAN MOORE
No. She's dead. You see her in his memories, but she's been dead for a few years, and Healdie’s never got over it. She married him, managed to make him feel really terrible about himself, then died, and left him feeling really terrible about himself. He's gone into a chronic, classic depression.
AO
Did you make him native?
ALAN MOORE
No, he came over here. Sammy was born here, but he came over from Jamaica. He's a good man, a really nice man, he's really depressed, and he's also... he doesn't want to think about another woman because that would be betraying his dead wife. He's almost got to be in mourning for her for the rest of his life, that's what he has decided.
MJB
Which is why he resents Gravie coming in because as a woman-
ALAN MOORE
He hates that. Now Gravie on the other hand, her and her husband were in Uganda, under Idi Amin. She does not like black men. She realises they're not all like that, but it was horrific. I mean I knew some Asian shopkeepers who'd been in Uganda and they said what it was like and it didn't sound good. You know, cars would pull up and the person in the street in front of you would just be shoved into the boot of the car and driven off and you'd never see them again. Now one of the best scenes that never made it to the comic, I wrote it, I think it was for #5, was when Gravie goes round to see Healdie because she is appointed as his social worker-
MJB
That's in #4.
AO
Is it #4?
ALAN MOORE
Yes, with the dog. It becomes a huge symbol for this awkwardness between them. It starts off quite a mess. They both feel bad about how badly they've behaved to each other, and they fall in love. Slowly over future meetings you start to realise that they're perfect for each other, and that there's a real heat between them, and things haven't been right between Gravie and Dilbagh for a long while because Dilbagh is an Asian Tory, Uganda terrified him. Is there a scene in #4 where one of the little men on the platform falls off the platform?
MJB
Yes, at the very end.
ALAN MOORE
And he panics for a moment because people don't vanish, that can't happen except for in Uganda and that's not there anymore. And then the guy says ‘It’s alright, I just fell off the platform onto the tracks but I am unhurt'. And also he is convinced that free enterprise works and that if you just work hard, that it'll be alright. And he's saying this to all of his customers, he's having his model train people say this, and they can't get onto the train because the doors don't open, and they've got little plastic things on their feet. They're always waiting for a train.
ALAN MOORE
Now as his business gets hit by the mall, Gravie's away a lot of the time and he is desperately in denial, he's working himself to death at the shop and also then going down and trying to get some solace from the model train layout. He starts to realise that free enterprise does not give a shit about him, and that it isn't going to work, he's lost it all. He is what I would have imagined to be the final scene of the comic. That he's lost his wife, the business is going under, and he's letting the train layout... gradually towards the end of the series you see that the train station is falling into disrepair and it's all becoming very Samuel Beckett. What's happening on the train platform is Beckett. Because dust is starting to gather. And I've got this one scene planned that would have been terrifying because in the comic, when you're actually zoomed in on the platform layout, then everybody's normal size, you don't think of them as being a few centimetres tall, and I was going to have, you know, it starts to become surreal, there's like a giant cigarette end, a giant cigarette end sort of on the platform, or, you know, which they're having to ignore, and then I was just going to have this bit where you've had a long conversation between these people and all of a sudden, a very large domestic spider comes out of one of the tunnels, and walks along the platform and of course it's taller than they are, and I thought if you got the audience to accept their size and then all of a sudden a spider runs out and knocks one of them over, and it'd be just pure horror.