KEY POINTS:
The frozen continent is a vast and empty place. The ice cracks and moans, the wind sweeps across the snow, the inhabitants don't say much, not even to as genial a host as the rumpled Marcus Lush.
The intrepid traveller's new series, Ice (TV One, last night, 7pm), has cute penguins aplenty, waddling and waving their flippers. Orcas spout magnificently at the edge of the sea ice but you get the feeling any interview requests might be mistaken as an offer to be their buffet lunch.
The laidback Lush, always one to go with the floe, nevertheless has his work cut out for him to fill five episodes on his southern polar explorations.
In his hit series on New Zealand's endangered train services, Off the Rails, there was always some small-town eccentric or local charmer to smooth the gaps between the train rides. In Ice, Lush has to fend more for himself.
Some of his monologues to camera are diverting, such as his description of his snow trench accommodation, as like sleeping in the freezer at the Tip Top factory. Others bouts of waxing lyrical go a little, well, off the rails.
New Zealand's Scott Base does, of course, have scientists, a couple of whom were only too happy to talk about their research and the importance of the continent as a global weather vane and record of human impact on the planet. Their comments were articulate and informative but Lush might find it hard to vary the diet when it comes to talking heads.
He did, however, do his best to inject drama, giving the first episode the grim title Misery and warning us that "you don't come to Antarctica for a good time - you come to throw yourself at the continent and see how you cope".
Apart from overdoing the thermal underwear and overheating on the flight down to the base, Lush's visit to the ice looked like one grand frolic under the blue skies of the midnight sun.
His compulsory survival training turned into a jolly time, as he slept "snug as a bug in a rug" in a snow cave. An expedition to the Dry Valleys was spectacular. On the ice shelf, nature turned it on supplying penguins and whales. The only time the permanently pillow-haired Lush looked uncomfortable was at the Secret Santa Christmas party at Scott Base.
That event wasn't the only example of enforced jollity, however. Some of the fillers in the show were also naff.
"Let the pictures speak for themselves," Lush said more sensibly at one point and the show does, indeed, offer some spectacular sights from the wind whipping clouds up McMurdo Sound to Antarctica's towering mountains.
Ice's prime time slot - earned, no doubt, by Off the Rails' success - must be the envy of filmmakers around the country. But television abhors a white-out: to fill four more episodes, Lush might have to pull something a bit more lateral than cheesy archival footage of scientists and their astounding facial hair, and silly antics with pavs, out of the dry-bag.
