And now, on BBC Four...

Sometimes the BBC can still really hit the spot. 

I'm presently watching BBC Four's two-hour 'All Aboard! The Sleigh Ride' - a slow, two-hour documentary without commentary, presenter or background music (from the people who brought us 'The Canal Trip') which is giving us a reindeer's eye view of snow-swathed northern Norway and the mainly female (and, if Dame Jenni and Jane Garvey will permit me, rather fetching) Sami herders as they track across an old postal route, over frozen lakes, through forests and snowy hills. And, yes, it's out-and-out magical. 

Often the only sounds are the the sound of reindeer hooves scrunching over the snow or reindeer munching lichen ('reindeer moss') from under the snow.

Occasional captions do the narrating. I accept them (as you tend to do on Christmas Eve, especially after the festive wine), though I did recoil a bit when I saw the 'The Sami have 150 words for snow and ice' caption as I've been told by sundry popular science writers that such claims, when related to the Eskimos, are absolute social scientific bunkum - and, thus, are surely likely to be just as much of a myth when applied to the Sami.

I didn't know it was a repeat but when I started telling friends and family to watch what I was watching on BBC Four on Christmas Eve I got two immediate replies (one direct, one on my mobile phone) saying they'd already been there, seen it, worn the (t-shirt) multi-coloured, fringed Sami shawl. 

Still, it's still going on and will surely be up on the iPlayer later, so if you've not seen it yet, please give it a go.