What the Dickens, what a movie!

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Slumdog Millionaire is a riveting marvel of a film and it is a source of rightful national pride that director Danny Boyle is a graduate of Bangor University.

It looks like a blisteringly modern work of cinematic craftsmanship. Editor Chris Dickens cuts and splices with the precision of a surgeon and the power of a butcher; each scene throbs to the beat of AR Rahman sensational score.

This is a story told through pictures. Some films are essentially stage plays captured on celluloid but Slumdog is a shattering example of cinema as a distinct and thrilling art form which – little more than a century after its birth – is just beginning to reveal its true power.

But the imaginative muscle behind this film’s grip is not the product of technical expertise. Slumdog stands in a storytelling tradition which must be fully revived if we are to make sense of this young but already bewildering century.

Its story of a child from the slums pursuing true love while scrambling for survival could have jumped from the pages of Charles Dickens.

Scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy told the director he felt the “shadow of Dickens” as he worked.

Dickens’s stories are classics of literature but his works were published in individual episodes designed to obsess and enthral his readers. Yes, he was a master of social observation and a chronicler of injustice, but he was also a genius at crafting a cliffhanger.

Slumdog is a commercial film which will enrich investors but it will also do more to inform audiences about the horror of the slums and the paradoxes of globalisation than any worthy article in a charity magazine.

A key achievement of the film is that there is no role for the likes of Mel Gibson or Angelina Jolie, no “good westerner” arrives to resolve crises. The story of Jamal’s journey from poverty to quiz show success – via terrifying encounters with gangsters, zealots and police interrogators – is more than sufficiently dramatic to engage even the most insular western audience.

Dickens enabled bourgeois readers to identify with people with whom they might have thought they had nothing in common. Great literature allows you to see the world through new eyes.

Brilliant television such The Wire and The West Wing illuminates the thinking of drug dealers and presidents, respectively. Such storytelling contains a voyeuristic element but is also enlightening and, as with Dickens’ novels, can be a force for social change.

Mighty entertainment takes us to new places and opens up amazing vistas. We need bold stories about the lives of Afghan villagers and Kremlin bureaucrats, credit crunching bankers and Lithuanian migrants.

But instead of telling stories about people, too often on television we are presented with professionals going about their jobs – doctors being doctors and police being police.

Let us hope the hot brilliance of Slumdog burns through Britain’s imaginative permafrost.