Dancing on Thin Ice with Torvill and Dean, review: an eco-voyage more bizarre than Bolero

On November 3 1997, Steve Coogan uttered five words that not only changed the way we think about factual programming, but anticipated the future of it.

Alan Partridge’s desperate pitch to the BBC commissioner of “Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank” is now rolled out whenever a new show comes along that has the whiff of the desperate TV exec about it, and, predictably, those five words were ringing in the air when ITV announced Dancing on Thin Ice with Torvill and Dean, a one-off documentary in which the Olympic gold medal-winning figure skaters explore climate change.

(Perhaps more famously at the time, Partridge also suggested “Monkey Tennis”, but it’s Eubank’s adventures in budget accommodation that endure. No network would make Monkey Tennis. Every network now makes versions of Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank.)

Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean are indeed unlikely conduits to examine melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels (hey, ITV have to advertise their new series of Dancing on Ice somehow), but the reality of Dancing on Thin Ice was worse than the Partridgism suggested. At the heart of the programme was the duo’s slightly silly quest to dance their famous Bolero, which won them gold at the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984, on some pristine Alaskan ice.

This formed a surprisingly neat backdrop on which to explore climate change, due to the fact that most Alaskan ice is a little mushy these days. However, stretching this sub-zero mission out to 90 minutes meant the inevitable – it became a whimsical travelogue, in the vein of Great Railway Journeys (minus Portillo and any kind of historical context), in which they asked jolly locals polite questions and Dean called everything “buh-yoodiful”.

So we had to endure subpar segments in which the pair attempted to play ice hockey against some stick-wielding children, visited Santa Claus (or at least a man called Santa Claus) in the town of North Pole, went dog-sledding and, in Dean’s case, braved the perishing waters for some ice diving. At one point, Dean ate a reindeer sausage and declared it “tastes just like a sausage”, while at another juncture Torvill said that she wouldn’t take ice for granted anymore, which is a bit like Wayne Rooney saying he’s just discovered a newfound respect for footballs.

In one unintentionally amusing moment, Dean stroked the vivid blue walls of a glacial ice cave, in the manner of a man who had just dropped his first tab of acid. “Just look at that,” he murmured, stroking his hands over the ice, “just feel that. I’ve never felt something so cold and smooth and… just buh-yoodiful shape. I love that.”

There was grit, however, and sending Torvill and Dean out to Alaska to do something so ephemeral as dance the Bolero on a frozen lake was actually rather moving. There are more than three million lakes in Alaska and, during winter, many of them should provide a decent platform for some Spandex and Salchows. Having experienced its warmest year on record, however, most of Alaska was simply too mild for Torvill and Dean’s “dream” of wild skating. They chased the ice north, trekked over glaciers, cajoled a friendly train-guard into stopping a long-haul service in the middle of nowhere to hunt for frozen lakes (which must have delighted the other passengers), but everywhere they went the ice was either buried under snow or not ice at all. The Arctic landscape is literally melting away. Climate change, we were told, is the culprit.

In the end they narrowed it down to one possible venue, Weiner Lake (nothing funny about that). This seemed a little far-fetched, given that the programme began with the pair dancing on a frozen lake in Alaska, before saying they’d “love to dance somewhere like this” (they just did) and “it would be inspirational – if we can do it” (they just did).

But no matter, their hunt for pristine ice helped to demonstrate, vividly, what climate change is doing to the planet. And they got to don their purple togs and relive Sarajevo in the Alaskan wilderness. In future, however, leave the trundling around the planet to Portillo and Palin.