It was full of fascinating detail, though I'm not convinced that all of their anecdotes will have successfully countered the prejudice that science privileges hard fact over morality and feeling. Tellingly it was pretty similar to the idiom used for the opening of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, Sky's lavish adaptation of one of Pratchett's gleefully otherworldly Discworld novels. It's the standard shorthand for there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. You'll know the kind of thing from countless television programmes: ethereal tinkling on the soundtrack and a lot of optical magic for the landscape shots, flaring the light into the otherworldly and the numinous. Oddly, though, this robust and rational defence of science – part of a distinctly defensive overture to Channel 4's celebration of British scientific brilliance – came dressed in the rhetoric of magic and the supernatural. Yes, science might have emptied "the haunted air and gnomed mine", but it has replaced the ghosts and the gnomes with something better. But Keats was wrong, said David Attenborough at the beginning of Genius of Britain – well, implicitly at least: "The world is full of wonders," he declared, "but they become more wonderful when science looks at them." Take that, Keats. It's delicious all the way through.Philosophy will clip an angel's wings," said Keats. It has a flavour, a texture that simply cannot be produced any other way.
Artists spent weeks, for example, addressing the two million envelopes lining the corridors with real Discworld locations. It comes as no surprise to learn that an unusual (in modern terms) amount of it was filmed on set rather than digitally created. A more febrile and endearing mass of nerves, loyalty and pin love I shall surely never meet.įrom the giant golem that imprisons and protects von Lipwig to the tiny clay-coloured beetles that infest the postmaster's long-abandoned desk, every scene is bursting with lovingly realised detail.
Ian Bonar deserves a special award for his turn as pin aficionado – or "pinhead" – Stanley Howler. The streets are lined with fantastical, tottering buildings that seem almost-but-not-quite to deny the laws of physics, and every performance seems to cleave to the same principle – climbing vertiginously but never quite going too far and overbalancing. It's all boundlessly clever, joyful and exuberant. To do this he must bring order to chaos – the post office corridors are filled with undelivered envelopes – and do battle with Reacher Gilt (David Suchet), the evil owner of the "Clacks" service (a Discworld proxy for t'interweb) that put the post office out of commission four years ago. "The last inch being the crux of the matter") and offered the chance to keep his neck intact by bringing the defunct postal system of Ankh-Morpork back to life. Richard Coyle plays Moist von Lipwig, a con man who is reprieved at the very last moment from the gallows ("You were hung to within an inch of your life," says Charles Dance, playing city patriarch Lord Vetinari. Going Postal (Sky1) is a two-part adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel of the same name. Oh, when I am President of the World this is how every Sunday and bank holiday Monday teatime will be – great slabs of fabulous telly smothered in lashings of Pratchett jam.
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