Mutiny on the Bounty? A picnic compared to this icy nightmare
DIVErS in the Arctic waters around Canada’s king William’s Island brought an extraordinary Victorian artefact to the surface a few years ago — the ship’s bell from hMS Erebus.
To anyone who doesn’t know the story of the doomed, two-ship Franklin Expedition, searching for a navigable route across the top of the Americas, that bell might seem an unremarkable find.
But for the crew crammed aboard the tiny steam-and-sail powered vessel, the bell was their only symbol of hope amid a frozen hell.
With the Erebus trapped in ice throughout the winter, they saw no daylight for months on end. This was 1846: to keep track of the days and nights they rang the bell, every half an hour.
The Terror (BBC2) tells the story of that lost expedition. Today it is largely forgotten, though 50 years ago it was still taught in schools, as the epitome of the reckless courage shown by British explorers at the height of the Empire.
Ciaran hinds plays Sir John Franklin, deeply religious and blithely certain that God meant him to map the Northwest Passage and create a short-cut from Britain to the Far East.
he is surrounded by a superlative cast — Greta Scacchi as his wife, Jared harris as his mutinous captain and Tobias Menzies playing the cocky junior officer who thinks he knows it all.
Among other faces you’ll recognise, even if you can’t immediately put a name to them, are Paul ready, Matthew McNulty and Ian hart.
For all the talent on tap, it’s a curiously stage-y production, almost like a historical re-enactment for a documentary by Neil Oliver or lucy Worsley. There’s a whiff of television-for-schools about the whole business.
The actors barely move and the camera angles are static too. Much of the script appears to be lifted from journals and letters.
Perhaps the intention was to create a sense of claustrophobia, but the result is that we never forget we are watching a play, set on a ship.
This is only made worse by the constant flashbacks to a night the officers spent at a london theatre, watching themselves depicted in a music hall tableaux.
Franklin’s second ship is hMS Terror. Its name echoes the nightmare and madness, bordering on the supernatural, that is to come. We had a hint, with a spectacularly gory autopsy on a boy sailor who died from TB.
No spoilers but, in the annals of naval history, the mutiny on the Bounty was an afternoon at a boating lake compared to the ordeal of Franklin’s crew.
Ben Fogle was exploring a different hell on earth as he visited the deserted city of Pripyat on Inside Chernobyl (C5).
he is used to meeting recluses on his New lives In The Wild, but the teenage thrill-seekers squatting in the derelict tower blocks and filming themselves scaling the abandoned rooftops are not your average hermits. A lethal dose of radiation seems a small price, to them, for the chance to upload selfies to social media from a nuclear wilderness.
Optimist Ben, who would see the good in Ivan the Terrible, thought these self-styled Chernobyl ‘stalkers’ were ‘kind of cool’.
But he was on safer territory chatting to Ukrainian grandmother Valentina, who had returned with her dog Dana and her accordion to the home she was forced to leave in 1986 after the nearby power station went into atomic meltdown.
As Valentina played a polka, Dana howled along — then chased her tail in excitement when Ben burst out laughing. It was a delightfully domestic scene, in the world’s least likely setting.