BBC4 will offer viewers a real-time Rudolph eye’s view of a two-hour sleigh ride through Lapland, its latest “slow TV” offering after half a million viewers watched the dawn chorus and an uninterrupted, commentary free canal boat trip.
The reindeer ride through Lapland’s frozen wilderness will be broadcast on BBC4 at Christmas, a two-hour fixed-rig film in which the only noise will be the crunching of snow and the tinkle of the reindeer bell.
The Sleigh Ride will be one of two new documentaries in the “slow TV” tradition alongside 90-minute documentary The Oak Tree.
The channel’s first slow TV season of “deliberately unhurried” programmes aired in May, intended as an antidote to the digital age and reflecting a recent Scandinavian TV phenomenon that can be traced back to the earliest days of film.
The BBC’s director of television, Danny Cohen, said: “We want BBC4 to be more and more characterful with a slightly eccentric quality to make shows no one else would make.
“We have been struck by the audience’s passion for quite slow television on BBC4.”
Cohen declined to say whether the Lapland documentary would culminate in a visit to the country’s most famous resident. “I can’t give away the ending,” he said. “We are going to leave that for viewers on the night.”
Slow TV became a hit in Norway in 2009 with a seven-hour film about a train journey, followed by a 12-hour knitting marathon and the live broadcast of a five-day boat trip watched by more than half of its population.
The Lumiere brothers did a similar thing, in shorter form, at the turn of the century, a tradition that was continued with the BBC’s “potter’s wheel” interlude film in the 1950s.
The BBC said The Sleigh Ride would give a “unique point of view of a Sami reindeer herder travelling across the terrain in real time” taking in the “awe-inspiring beauty of a white wonderland” with the possibility of spotting a wild moose.
