Richard Cosway was the go-to guy for miniatures, and the Prince of Wales was his best customer. It was art you could carry on your person – “the 18th-century equivalent of your phone picture” – and it became a vital tool in the pursuit of love. The most fashionable evocation of romance in those days was the miniature. The resulting portrait, in which Van Dyck managed something like a resurrection, is both touching and haunting. The distraught Digby summoned his friend Van Dyck to paint her on her deathbed they even pinched her cheeks to give her face some colour. Last night, Schama dealt with the portraiture of love, beginning with the story of Sir Kenelm Digby, whose wife Venetia – a great beauty of the age – died unexpectedly one night in 1633. The Face of Britain by Simon Schama (BBC2) continues to be one of the best things on TV it can certainly claim to be without peer on Wednesdays. I’d be happy to stay in the hotel, and take his word for it. “The ice is never better than when you’ve picked it yourself,” said Armstrong. Armstrong boards an ice-breaking vessel with a man whose sole employment seems to involve sailing out into the bay to collect chips of iceberg for tourists to put in their drinks. You couldn’t really call it anything else. “Even the name Ilulissat means ‘the icebergs’,” said Armstrong.
There is, for example, Ilulissat, a dramatic cityscape of icebergs floating down a fjord. And Greenland is one of those places I’m really glad I watched a programme about, instead of accidentally going to. He treats everyone he meets as if they have just had a really good round on Pointless. The two most important qualities of such a programme are the affability of its presenter and the forbidding remoteness of the destination.Īrmstrong is, of course, the embodiment of affability, whether he is dancing with Inuits or accompanying Danish soldiers on their 26-month sled dog patrol across a snowy expanse of nowhere. If the modern celebrity travelogue serves any purpose, this is it: someone you have heard of does something you probably wouldn’t do yourself, but are mildly interested in watching. That’s right: if you’re minded to, you can snorkel through icy water along the chasm between two tectonic plates. “I’m told I can get an even better view by immersing myself in near-freezing water,” said Armstrong. His first stop, however, was Thingvellir national park in Iceland, a place where the Eurasian and North American plates meet. This particular segment of the Arctic Circle took him as far as Greenland. I n the second instalment of Land of the Midnight Sun (ITV), Alexander Armstrong continued his journey through the frozen north.
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