An uneven portrait of one of Britain’s great storytellers
Philip Pullman has sold 20 million books, which means there is roughly one copy out there, mainly of the His Dark Materials series, for every 25 Harry Potters. It’s a shame. As Imagine: Philip Pullman – Angels & Daemons (BBC One) reminded us, in the course of an hour-and-a-bit of talking heads and gentle probing by Alan Yentob, Pullman is by far the better writer. The rhythm and precision of his sentences, the learning, and the ambition of his work all outstrip the competition by miles.
Remembering the darkness and intensity of Pullman’s stories, which see his characters caught up in a plot to kill God, however, it sometimes seemed surprising they found such a wide audience. This mostly straight chronology of the author’s life put it down to his fine storytelling craft, honed during years working as a teacher, and the resonance of his ideas with readers who are undergoing drastic changes themselves. Take the characters’ daemons – the animal familiars that are the physical, outer manifestation of their inner selves – changing form until adolescence and embodying the conflicts of puberty. Even Pullman recognised it as “the best idea I’ve ever had.”
The young Pullman was not racked by self-doubt, even when he went up to Exeter College, Oxford. “I thought my talent was such that the world would have no choice but to reward it,” he said. The formative trauma in the author’s life was the death of his father, Alfred, a pilot in the RAF. As a child Pullman was told Alfred died heroically. Later he learnt it might have been suicide by a man who was engaged in suppressing the Mau Mau and was in trouble with money and women. We were invited to draw our own conclusions about the effect all this had on the darkly atheistic timbre of his books.
The episode was at its best on religion. The most interesting talking heads were the journalist, Peter Hitchens, a committed Christian, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. At other times it felt as if Yentob had wandered around Broadcasting House collecting whoever he happened to bump into, the dread John Humphrys here, a Maggie Aderin-pocock there, adding enthusiasm but not much insight.
Pullman is one of our great storytellers, and it was hard not to agree with his publisher, who said he thought he would be remembered in the same breath as Tolkien and CS Lewis. But like many writers, Philip Pullman has not lived an especially interesting life, his gargantuan success aside. Whatever biographical snippets there might be, Pullman’s alchemy occurs on sheets of lined paper, in a shed at the bottom of his garden. It’s difficult to film.
At the end of Collateral (BBC Two) Kip Glasbie (Carey Mulligan) was unable to save Captain Shaw (Jeany Spark), but Mulligan saved the series. Her performance stood out so clearly that one wondered if David Hare had written one script for her and another for everyone else. These were meant to be detectives, spooks and MPS, but many of the characters spoke haltingly, leaving beats where they should have been tripping over each other.
In last night’s final episode, the early confrontation between David Mars MP (John Simm, wholly wasted) and the Labour leader Deborah Clifford (Saskia Reeves) was particularly grating: a sophomoric shambles of exposition and clunking authorial politics.
Somehow Mulligan glided through all this more or less unaffected. Her cadence fell where others’ rose, she sped up where others slowed. Few actors are better at walking the line between smartness and vulnerability, as adept at crumpling a smirk to the point of tears. Seeing what she did with this material, you could almost hear the clicks as screenwriters around the land opened a new file called “Unnamed Mulligan Vehicle”.
The dialogue was all the more a pity because there was plenty else to like about Collateral. It had cinematic ambitions, a clutch of great actors, and a laudable desire to poke its head behind the doorways of power. It was shot beautifully at times, showing a shadowy London of fearful refugees and sneering politicians. Even the plot was nearly convincing, impressive given the establishment-conspiracy-versus-human-compassion formula. Attention was paid to detail, as with Shaw’s raw and dirty fingernails as she scribbled a note in her hotel room. Without Mulligan the series would have failed, but with her, it was a modest success. Immaculate icing rescued a dry cake; the opposite of collateral damage.
Imagine: Philip Pullman – Angels and Daemons Collateral