Think our extreme climate is bad? Try weathering 1963
Parents at a Merseyside school were admonished this week for keeping their children at home after the half-term holiday because… it was windy. “I have to say I find this staggering, not least because most live in very close proximity to the school,” the headteacher wrote in a letter to all parents. One mother told the Liverpool Echo that the letter was “disgusting” and had reduced her to tears.
One wonders what these parents would have done in the winter of 1963, when Britain spent 10 weeks in the grip of freezing temperatures and snow. Far from grinding to a halt, the country simply got on with it, as we were reminded in The Big Freeze: Winter ’63 (Channel 5). The freak conditions were “what you’d probably call these days a ‘climate change Armageddon’,” said weatherman John Kettley.
This was a well-edited programme, put together by ITN, featuring archive footage and reminiscences from various talking heads. At first, I did wonder why they had assembled such a random selection of contributors, but they all added lovely bits of colour. Record producer Pete Waterman brought his knowledge of the railways and homes with outside loos. Joanna Lumley was at her most Lumley-esque, recalling life at boarding school where the girls were encouraged to keep the dorm windows open even as temperatures plummeted far below freezing: “Flannels would freeze rigid.”
We were shown images of the sea freezing over at Southend, stranded workers trekking through snowdrifts, reports of electricity blackouts and babies being delivered by candlelight. The threat of milk shortages was described as “a potential disaster on a national scale” (a notion to baffle today’s oat-milk aficionados).
There was undoubtedly hardship, but also a droll humour to some coverage of the time. “Remember football? It was a game the British used to play and watch every Saturday until seven weeks ago,” a reporter said from the side of a snowbound pitch. The programme looked up Diana Wood, wife of the Minister of Power, who had gamely posed in black fishnet tights and woolly pants to demonstrate the importance of warm undergarments.
An effort was made to link that winter to today’s events – community spirit; mask-wearing in the pea-souper of December 1962. Was British society changed by the big freeze? The contributors here seemed to think so. As Waterman put it: “Nothing was predictable after that.”
Historians could have a field day with Vikings: Valhalla, the epic new series from Netflix, available from today. The rest of us can enjoy it for what it is: a lusty adventure with a Hollywood script and a cast of manly warriors who look as if they’ve just stepped out of a salon.
It is a spin-off from Vikings, which ran for six years on the History channel and Amazon Prime Video, but you don’t need to have seen that to watch this: the action is set 100 years later, with Aethelred the Unready murdering England’s Danes in the St Brice’s Day massacre. Cue a bunch of Vikings out for vengeance, led by King Canute.
The Game of Thrones comparisons are inevitable, but it’s nothing like it. Really, it’s closer to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, just without the jokes. The writer is Jeb Stuart, of Die Hard and
The Fugitive. Characters say things like: “I will not stop until I get my revenge!”
A key character is Prince Harald, played by Leo Suter (Sanditon and
Beecham House) as a buff action hero with a perfect tan. Suter is English, the actor playing Canute (Keeping Faith’s Bradley Freegard) is from Pontypridd, while the rest of the cast are from across the globe, and they’re all making guesses at a Viking accent. It doesn’t matter, because Netflix has its eye on a global hit and most of the world will be watching with subtitles. There are also plenty of extras whose sole line is “heuugghh” while taking an arrow between the shoulder blades.
After a well-paced opening episode the plot starts to drag, mainly when it focuses on a female character, Freydís Eiríksdóttir (Frida Gustavsson), back in Scandinavia while the main action takes place in England. It is much better when giving us battle scenes, or the machinations involving Aethelred’s callow son, Edmund, and shrewd wife, Emma of Normandy.
Most of the characters are based on historical figures (although in the name of diversity they’ve made Norwegian ruler Haakon Sigurdsson a black woman). It will likely lead to a surge in interest in Viking history – I was prompted to look up the people and events depicted here, as well as how often Viking men washed their hair.
The Big Freeze: Winter ’63 ★★★★
Vikings: Valhalla ★★★