Author Philip Pullman’s most well-known work is the trilogy His Dark Materials, which has won several prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children’s Book Award, and (for The Amber Spyglass) the Whitbread Book of the Year Award - the first time in the history of that prize that it was given to a children’s book.
The Golden Compass, which was released in December 2007, is the first of the trilogy to be filmed.
Philip’s reasons for supporting the Save Kids’ TV Campaign
“Save Kids’ TV is an organisation that we shouldn’t need. We shouldn’t need it, because we should be able to trust the television channels to create and broadcast excellent programmes for our children, programmes which reflect the lives of modern British children in the society they know as well as exploring the imaginative, the funny and the fascinating.
The fact that such programmes are almost impossible to make today is not due to any lack of talent; it’s due to the dogmatic insistence that profit is more important than anything else, and that cutting costs and increasing profits must prevail over every other consideration. But there are things that cannot be measured by financial yardsticks, and one of these is the well-being of children.
There used to be such a thing as a sense of responsibility among broadcasters: a feeling that this extraordinary medium, with so much to offer and so much power to affect lives, should be used to make things better, richer, more interesting for those who made up the audience – especially for children. But the ideology of ‘profit before everything’ shows itself to be as toxic in this field as in every other. When audiences are regarded as customers to be separated from their money as quickly and efficiently as possible, there is no chance for life-enhancing work to flourish, and children are regarded as a marketing opportunity at best, a dangerous and feral threat at worst, and an expensive nuisance otherwise.
This social poison goes much deeper than broadcasting, of course, but it’s particularly visible there. Taking children’s needs seriously is not different from taking every human need seriously – it’s absolutely central to a true and humane vision of the whole of life. if we need to challenge the prevailing neo-liberal market-based state religion in order to do it, then we should do so proudly.
Children need the best of everything, and that includes the best of television – not the cheapest. Save Kids’ TV is working to make sure they get it.”
Philip’s reaction to the decline in quality children’s television revealed in the Ofcom report into Children’s Public Service Broadcasting (Oct 2007):
“I welcome the OFCOM report, which makes very clear the dangers facing children’s television. Like many other examples of decay and neglect in our common life, this is result of a dogmatic insistence that the market always knows best, and must have the final decision about the way we live; and as with other such things, the problem can only be cured by telling the market who’s boss. In this case, the boss is whatever children need from this wonderful and extraordinary medium, which could serve their interests and their needs so well – including the needs they don’t know they have. We can’t go back to a primal state of televisual innocence, but we could go forward to a state of richness and delight and information and curiosity, if we had the will. I hope the government will take heed of this report and take urgent steps to safeguard the provision of imaginative, intelligent, witty and beautiful television for children. Why should they have to make do with anything less?”
