After all that lukewarm festive telly, two frosty delights to melt the heart
ALONG-AGO editor of mine called it the Law of Carrots: when there’s a story about carrots on Page 7 of the paper, you can be certain to read another on Page 11.
And when a character falls through the ice and almost drowns while skating on a frozen lake, in a costume drama on Christmas night — you can bet your last sausage roll that another will do exactly the same thing on Boxing Day.
Sure enough, Prince Albert plunged through the thin ice on a garden pond at Buckingham Palace in Victoria on ITV, and was almost swept away by a powerful current, which is jolly bad luck in a garden pond.
Then, in Little Women (BBC1), sulky little sister Amy (Kathryn Newton) had no sooner donned her skates than she was taking a cold bath. Coincidence? Or destiny? You decide . . .
This adaptation of Little Women, by Call The Midwife creator Heidi Thomas, stayed close to the text of Louisa M. Alcott’s 1869 novel, so close that for the first half-hour the scenes were more like surreal impressions.
We saw the four girls snipping off locks of their hair to send to their father, away at the war, before skipping through the snow to give their Christmas breakfast to poor
PALAVER OF THE NIGHT: Three brothers with plenty of face-fuzz pitched their beard-grooming kits on Dragons’ Den (BBC2). Pomades, gels, oils, scents . . . and I thought shaving was a drag. Being a metrosexual hipster looks like hard work.
neighbours. Jo (Maya ThurmanHawke, the daughter and spitting image of Uma Thurman) read to her ancient aunt (Angela Lansbury) with a macaw perched on her arm, and the girls had a snowball fight to a soundtrack of Caribbean music, played on electronic steel drums — truly odd.
For the first 30 minutes, there was little sense of the sisters’ different personalities, until Amy stuffed the manuscript of Jo’s halfwritten novel in their wood-burner. That clarified things.
The strangeness of their American society, both archaic and parochial, was exaggerated by some of the language: one or two speeches, and passages read from letters, seemed nearly medieval.
But gradually the four characters, with their saintly mother (Emily Watson), exerted themselves. By the time Jo had impetuously sold her long tresses to a wigmaker, the story was crackling nicely. It continues tonight and tomorrow and promises to be one of the better things on telly throughout the holidays.
Strong contender for the very best show was the jaw- dropping documentary Snow Bears (BBC1).
It followed a female polar bear and her two cubs, from the moment they emerged from their icebound den on Svalbard, north of Norway, and traced their trek to hunting grounds far beyond the frozen Arctic Ocean.
The footage was astonishingly intimate, bringing us so close that you felt you could reach out and stroke the cubs.
The voiceover by Kate Winslet told us little of how the pictures were achieved, but when I interviewed film-maker Philip Dalton last month, he let me in on a few of his secrets.
When the bears were swimming, for instance, and hauling themselves out of the water to feast on the carcass of a whale, the film crew didn’t dare get too close in a motorboat.
For one thing they could spook the bears and for another they risked being crushed to death by ice floes.
So their solution was to embed a camera in a radio- controlled iceberg, which they steered by remote control. The bears simply ignored it.
One of the cubs, trying to nab a seal pup, attempted to copy Albert and Amy, by plunging through the ice into the water below.
He bounced off, head first. The Law of Carrots never works when you want it to.