UR TV CAST

“Hell, not even OJ Simpson gets a press as bad as that,” said an American studio executive on reading some of the digs at Branagh.The cuttings are full of them. “The greatest act of hubris since Prometheus absconded with the rights to divine fire,” snorted a reviewer when Branagh dared to beg comparison with Laurence Olivier by remaking Henry V when he was only 26. Hubris has always been a favourite word among Branagh-phobes. When he then wrote his autobiography at 28, apparently to help finance his theatre company Renaissance, he was, suggested someone at The Guardian, doubtless a classics graduate, “overdosing on hubris. Is that nemesis waiting in the wings?”The knocking got louder during his marriage to Emma Thompson, and unpleasantly triumphant when the marriage failed. Yet the object of all this bile – not to mention a fair amount of adulation, of course – seems surprisingly mild-mannered, evidently no less cowed than I am by his forbidding, if admirably protective publicist, who sits in on our encounter and keeps leaning forward to insist that we talk only about Shackleton.We are not permitted to discuss Heydrich, Eric and Ernie – a trio of names that rather sums up Branagh’s impressive versatility – so heaven knows how she might react if I were to utter the names Emma or Helena (his former squeeze Helena Bonham Carter). Still, when she slips out for a few minutes, we fall hungrily upon his other projects.

In the meantime, in fairness, Shackleton is an immensely rich topic on its own.The two-part drama chronicles the most heroic of failures, the explorer’s 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica. When his ship Endurance was crushed by ice before actually reaching the continent, Shackleton led his men in three rowing-boats through the melting ice to the uninhabited Elephant Island, from where he and a small crew set out on the appallingly perilous 800-mile voyage across the Weddell Sea to South Georgia; their aim to get help from a whaling station there.But even having landed on South Georgia, they still had to cross a mountain range to reach the whaling station. Shackleton finally returned to Elephant Island four months after setting off. His men were all rescued, with the loss of some frostbitten toes but no lives. With tragic irony, however, some of them later died on the Western Front, having survived the worst that nature could throw at them.The towering achievement of this BBC production – made by the team behind the award-winning Longitude, writer-director Charles Sturridge and producer Selwyn Roberts – is in making those unimaginable conditions imaginable.

Filming took place over five weeks in Greenland, on ice floes that were scarcely less treacherous than the ones Shackleton confronted; indeed the hostile environment helped the cast nail their characters.”There was intense emotional bonding, great generosity and a fantastic amount of banter, with everyone being ribbed senseless all the time and some filthy nicknames,” Branagh recalls.”But there was also a near-riot one afternoon. The conditions make you peculiarly hungry and potentially cranky, and when people realised that someone who’d just arrived had brought a bag of Mars bars, it was like watching a group of rats. The woman with the bag was almost savaged, and afterwards people were getting quite narked that person X hadn’t shared their Mars bar. Shackleton’s diaries, and the diaries of others on the expedition, contain an obsession with that kind of detail.”Branagh was himself obsessive in researching Shackleton’s life, scrutinising books and diaries and archives. “Despite being knighted he was something of an outsider, clearly a flawed human being.