Weekly funniest things

[SaRsAk!!]

Next year, Good Omens turns 30. In those three decades, it has sold millions of copies around the world and been adapted for radio. Terry Gilliam onceattempted to make a film of it and it is (probably) going to be a huge TV series later this year. Its authors, meanwhile, have both individually sold several million more books and had entire industries set up around them. But in the notes in the back of my copy of Good Omens, both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett insist that writing the book “wasn’t a big deal”. The thing they say we should remember is that “in those days Neil Gaiman was barely Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was only just Terry Pratchett”.

That’s not quite how I remember it. When I got hold of Good Omens, aged 14, I’d read just about everything Pratchett had published up to that point. The idea that he’d teamed up with a gothy longhair to write about the end of the world seemed about as big as book news got. By the time I realised the book existed in 1991, a year after it first came out, it was definitely a “big deal”. Unusually for a so-called fantasy book, it had received favourable reviews in the UK press (alongside the notice in the Times that generated the memorable cover quote, “not quite as sinister as the authors’ photo”) – and it was selling in huge quantities.