The first
attempt to dramatise Philip Pullman’s exceptional novel didn’t work because the
film exorcised the one of the main themes of the story for fear of offending
anyone. It looks like this lavish 8 part tv series will not make the same
mistake. While modernising some aspects of the setting- at least from what I
recall reading- the opening episode conjures up exactly the sort of world we
imagine Pullman created. There’s the airships gliding over a slightly exaggerated
Oxford, the slinky deamons beside or above people and there’s the whiff of
academic panic when Lord Asriel presents Jordan College’s finest with facts
they’d rather not hear.
