It is hard for my puny human brain to comprehend beauty on the scale of the Himalayas.

Not just mine, in fact. So mind-bendingly wondrous are the majestic fractal peaks in The Epic of Everest (screened on BBC4 this week and now on catch-up and in cinemas) that the Tibetans who live at their feet must be the closest humans on our planet to a certain…godlike consciousness.

Now, I know I am prone to fervent exaggeration and, er, away with the fairies at the best of times. But this film, made from archive footage of Captain John Noel’s 1924 expedition, has hit me HARD.

Doesn’t sound all that appealing on paper, does it? I admit, I stumbled across TEOE while up, slightly wired by insomnia, too late on a school night.

Yes, the footage of the expedition is grainy, bobbly, even, and monochrome, because…well, it’s from 1924!

That’s basically before the dawn of time, technologically speaking, and even before the days of ‘talkies’, so we are served exquisitely retro subtitles to explain the action and embroider each scene with detail.

The fact that any snippets of film survived at all is miraculous when you consider the brutality of life in this landscape, plunging by 50 degrees once the glittering sun is eclipsed sideways by shadow every evening. Noel’s climb tragically culminated in the deaths of the climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, as the film testifies.

His original footage has been restored by the BFI National Archive, touched up with masterful coloured tints and tones. The results serve as an icy blast from the past and the splendour of the mountain scenes captured seems almost more gorgeous because they are in the sharp relief of black and white.

To watch something so old-school on a high-definition flat-screen might seem perverse, but it really is a beauty that scaled the peak of my television must-see list. The Himalayas, fading to sunset red in the final scenes – the only splash of colour – was almost too beautiful to absorb.

Key to the slow enjoyment that unfolds from TEOE is the trippy, ambient electronica soundtrack that oozes and swirls from the screen, composed by Simon Fisher Turner.

Noel’s ability not just to survive the expedition, but to frame the vulnerability, isolation and courage of the Tibetan Sherpas battling their way upwards through the looming shards of ice and rock, is breathtaking.

The team, ludicrously equipped with all the colonial trappings of a jolly day out, such as bone china for taking tea, look tiny, even with their huge lumbering yak transport, before the crystal monastery and epic scenery, forged by shifting ice. The reality is that none of it looks real, but it is truly life-or-death stuff.

Much less edifying is 10,000 Years BC (Mondays, Channel 5, 10pm) which offers those mourning the end of Celebrity Big Brother slim pickings in terms of reality edutainment. In the first episode, American archaeologist and survival expert Klint Janulis ushered the bunch of happy campers to remote Bulgaria where they were presented with a dead deer.

Any enthusiasm ebbed away to damp despair as the team, immediately splitting into male and female stereotypes, struggled to come to terms with the silliness of life without a lighter as well as maggot-infested animal skins and a diet of slowly rotting meat, hung high to dry on a nearby tree where flies made merry on its meaty surface. Ugh.

You start to envy the vegan contestant, even if you know her life for the next two months is going to consist of foraging for nuts and berries. Watching this lot struggle seems like a step too far back in time.

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