I think the appeal of this trip is, in every sense of the word, the bigness of it-the bigness in time, the bigness in distance, the bigness as a challenge-a challenge of human endurance.
Wally Herbert, leader of the British Trans-Arctic Expedition, along with three other men and forty huskies, set off from Barrow, a small Eskimo village in Alaska, on February 21 this year. These four men intend making a 3,800-mile trek across the constantly shifting and breaking ice of the Arctic Ocean to the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen. It will take them one and a half years.
Filmed by a BBC crew who lived and worked with the expedition, tonight's programme tells the story of the tense and anxious weeks leading up to their departure and of their first days on the ice. Now, nine weeks out, what are their chances? In the studio to give their own personal views are two Polar explorers, Colonel Andrew Croft and Sir Vivian Fuchs.
Programme introduced by Magnus Magnusson.
Commentary written by John Lloyd.

(Colour)