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Program Title
Credits Executive Producer: Robert Buckler Producer: Tim VanRellim Director: Ferdinand Fairfax Intro THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH/Episode 1/Alistair Cooke Good evening, I'm Alistair Cooke. We begin tonight a six-part series called The Last Place on Earth, which is that continent that is covered by a layer of ice one mile high. A continent twice the size of the United States, at its center the South Pole, which when our story begins in 1907, nobody had ever reached. So this is the story of the famous race through Antarctica between the Englishman, Captain Scott and the Norwegian Amundsen. Roald Amundsen was born in Oslo in 1872 and he had a boyhood urge to be a doctor. He studied medicine for a while, but he had a stronger urge to go to sea, and in his twenties he joined a Belgian expedition that was the first ever to winter in the Antarctic. Now it seems that Amundsen, whenever he was on land long enough, had chronic trouble with creditors. In his thirty-second year, to escape them, he set off on a grandiose voyage that had excited--and baffled--explorers since the time of Columbus. It was to find the Northwest Passage, which is to go through the continental barrier of the Americas into the South Sea. He did it and became a national hero second only to the great Nansen who was the father of polar exploration. After that, Amundsen decided to go for the North Pole, but as we shall see, he was beaten to it and he changed his plans. Now Robert Falcon Scott was a sailor all his life. He was four years older than Amundsen. He began in the British tradition as a naval cadet, as King George V and later King Edward VIII did at the age of thirteen. He became a Midshipman at fifteen, and a full lieutenant at twenty-two. Ten years later, he lead a British Antarctic expedition which went as far south as anyone had ever gone and he came back to England and was promoted captain and was a sort of fledgling hero. But a younger colleague, Ernest Shackelton, who sledded within ninety-seven miles of the Pole, snatched the glory of that first expedition from him. When we begin, that news is just about to break when Captain Scott commits a blunder that in the greatest and proudest of the world's navies is unforgivable. He'd stayed in the Navy and commanded various ships, the last of which was the Albemarle. He involved it in a collision at sea and it's made pretty plain to him that his chances of promotion are remote. He thinks he will redeem himself by having another try at the South Pole. At about this time, he meets a very independently minded young woman, a sculptress, who boosts his rather wobbly ego by telling him he is a man of destiny. We come in on Scott just after the collision incident, being subjected to the sarcasm and disciplining of the Navy brass. The Last Place on Earth, episode one.  Episode number: 1 2 3 4 5 6
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