' You either like it and then you love it, or you can't take it.'
Norway's Spitsbergen islands, only a few hundred miles from the North Pole, are home to about 1,000 Norwegians, but twice that number of Russians. Under a 1920 treaty, the subjects of 41 countries including Britain can live and work there.
This is a look at life in the coal-mining communities, all daylight in summer and all darkness in winter; at the delicate relationship with the Soviet Union because of Spitsbergen's strategic position: and at the sudden nourishing of wildlife and plants each year in its hard and beautiful landscape.
Presented and produced by John Arnott