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AN OUTSTANDING, UNSUNG BBC SHACKLETON FILM
The Recent success of both the IMAX and the Channel 4 Shackleton films has somewhat eclipsed a fine earlier Shackleton feature film made by BBC TV in association with The Entertainment Channel, Seven Network Australia and Television New Zealand.
Shackleton, written by Christopher Ralling, produced by John Harris and directed by Martyn Friend (with original music by Francis Shaw) starred David Schofield as Shackleton, John Watts as Frank Worsley and David Rodigan giving a particularly strong and memorable performance as Frank Wild.
In particular, Ralling's film made strenuous efforts to do justice to the boat journey aboard the James Caird and the mountain crossing of South Georgia, neither of which, some have suggested, felt wholly satisfactory in more recent versions such as the Imax and Endurance films.
Christopher Ralling, whose selection of writings by Shackleton was also published as a BBC book in 1983, has a long line of credits to his name, including films on Sir Henry Morton Stanley (Find Livingstone), Darwin (The Voyages of Charles Darwin, 1978) and Thor Heyerdahl (Kon-Tiki Man). He directed The Two Coasts of China (1992), produced The Fight against Slavery (series of six 50 minute films, 1974; co-directed Africa - Mastering a Continent (1984), Conflict of the Gods (the story of the native American religions' struggles with the Conquistadors), The Buried Mirror, about the North American Indians (1991); The Pacific Century (a series of 60 minute films, 1992); Chasing a Rainbow : The Life of Josephine Baker (l986); and more recently narrated Challenge of the Seas (1997).
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