George Mallory, the doomed Everest explorer who died on the mountain in 1924, once delivered a lecture in which he tried to articulate his motivation: "To refuse the adventure is to run the risk of drying up like a pea in its shell." This defined the spirit of the brave men who took on the world's greatest mountain and, in 1953, on the morning of our Queen's coronation, subjugated it.
Words on Everest (ITV, Tuesday), a documentary created to mark the 60th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's achievement, interspersed authentic footage of the attempts of 1924 and 1953 with extracts of the climbers' writings, read to camera by different actors. Inexplicably, these actors were all rather odd-looking. Toby Jones looked like a talking potato. Stephen Campbell Moore had a distractingly immobile upper lip; Freddie Fox was in possession of a tongue so large and round that it resembled a slice of salami, sliding out between sentences. I digress.
Rather than present the two expeditions sequentially, the documentary chose to chop between them, creating an ungainly blink-and-you-miss-it motif. On the whole, though, it was successful, mainly because climbers' own words are vivid and moving. This was particularly the case with Tenzing Norgay, the sherpa who accompanied Hillary to the top. The wind, he said, roared "like a thousand tigers". And once the forbidding mountain had been conquered, it seemed warm and friendly, "like a mother hen", with the mountains around it resembling "its chicks".
Did you know that "poor, gallant Mallory and Irvine" attempted the climb with no oxygen, dressed in "thin tweed suits and hobnail boots"? They died less than 1,000 ft from the summit.
29 May, 2013
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Source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNHn6d2r3v-wAObxQkIccMBvNtGWeg&url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10085042/Words-on-Everest-ITV-review.html
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