CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV: Mutiny on the Bounty? A picnic compared to this icy nightmare

 Divers in the Arctic waters around Canada’s King William’s Island brought an extraordinary Victorian artefact to the surface a few years ago — the ship’s bell from HMS Erebus.

To anyone who doesn’t know the story of the doomed, two-ship Franklin Expedition, searching for a navigable route across the top of the Americas, that bell might seem an unremarkable find.

But for the crew crammed aboard the tiny steam-and-sail powered vessel, the bell was their only symbol of hope amid a frozen hell.

+3

Tobias Menzies as James Fitzjames (pictured left) and Ciaran Hinds as Sir John Franklin (right). For all the talent on tap, it’s a curiously stage-y production, writes Christopher Stevens 

With the Erebus trapped in ice throughout the winter, they saw no daylight for months on end. This was 1846: to keep track of the days and nights they rang the bell, every half an hour.

The Terror (BBC2) tells the story of that lost expedition. Today it is largely forgotten, though 50 years ago it was still taught in schools, as the epitome of the reckless courage shown by British explorers at the height of the Empire.

Ciaran Hinds plays Sir John Franklin, deeply religious and blithely certain that God meant him to map the Northwest Passage and create a short-cut from Britain to the Far East.