God awful: BBC1’s His Dark Materials reviewed

‘Here’s your new Sunday night obsession…’ the BBC announcer purred, overintoned and mini-orgasmed, like she was doing an audition for a Cadbury’s Flake commercial, ‘… a dazzling drama with a stellar cast.’

My hackles rose. Did no one ever mention to her the rule about ‘show not tell’? And my hackles were right. His Dark Materials has indeed become my Sunday night obsession: how can the BBC’s most-expensive-ever drama series possibly look, sound and feel so clunkingly, God-awfully, disappointingly flat?

Yes, I know Philip Pullman’s trilogy is an extended, bitter rant against Christianity disguised as children’s entertainment. But I loved reading those novels, especially the first two, which may be meandering, obscure and mawkish in places but are nonetheless thrillingly imagined, deliciously dark and hauntingly evocative. When I finally saw the magnificence of Svalbard, I found myself thinking: ‘So this is where Iorek Byrnison lives!’ — and neither book nor landscape felt wanting in the comparison.

But this HDM, to judge by episode one, is going to be as exciting as a grey fortnight becalmed in the doldrums with no wifi or cards or Pass the Pigs. Characters and settings appear with the same names they have in the books but it all feels perfunctory, done by numbers and slightly rushed. There’s no one — not even Lyra — that you can properly inhabit; the script is by turns leaden and, when it’s not being crudely expository, mystifying; the overblown score is dire. It just feels like odd, not particularly well-drawn or sympathetic individuals being manoeuvred, like chess pieces, through events which though exotic leave you cold, confused and bored.

Since Pullman gets a production credit, I can only assume he’s on board with this travesty. My guess is that, a bit like J.K.