Tamzin can't cap Shackleton

Tamzin Outhwaite plays a Royal Military Police recruit

The BBC's William Gallagher reviews two seasonal dramas - Channel 4's Shackleton and BBC One's Red Cap.

Channel 4 drama Shackleton is by far the best of the crop of Christmas shows about expeditions (The Lost World and Stephen Fry's look into Paddington Bear: The Early Years).

Like the channel's Longitude two years ago, it is a rich, true story with a complex tale told very fast, with first-rate acting.

Its sheer speed is a problem at times.

An hour or more is spent on the preparations for Shackleton's voyage, with myriad scenes and characters flying by.

Kenneth Branagh: Marvellous performance

In any expedition tale the preparation scenes risk being boring - there is no drama as you know the voyage will go ahead.

Yet by lobbing so many scenes and ideas at us, Shackleton makes the viewer understand just what the personal cost of this expedition was to be.

It also meant the actors had to be quick and strong to do more than just tell the plot.

Without exception they were, but none more so than star Kenneth Branagh.

Now known most for an almost unhealthy obsession with making Shakespeare films, Branagh is remarkably good on television.

He is as good here as in his career-launching performance in the BBC's tremendous Fortunes of War in the 1980s.

That was a glorious wartime fiction, but Shackleton, also set against a war background, startles more.

We are surprised when suddenly shown scenes that are familiar from the famous photographs of the real expedition.

These add to the realism and ultimately to the utter cold of it all.

Those images, the sight of the ship Endurance and the realistic sound of the ice make this simply fantastic.

It is also a treat to see a drama that you know cannot become a series.

Shackleton starts on Channel 4 at 2100 on Wednesday 2 January

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Red Cap

Tamzin Outhwaite's career and the BBC's future ratings success feel like the only reasons for this drama. It is flat and oddly empty.

It is a showreel, with Outhwaite working through a long list of standard clichés and screamingly obvious and belaboured plot twists.

Our first sight of her as Jo McDonagh is on a firing range - all military dramas apparently have to begin here.

Tamzin Outhwaite: Not taxed in her new showcase

She jogs like Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs, cries when she is on her own and has a big emotional scene that gets information out of a suspect.

The whole show feels like a man's idea of what drives a woman - so, for instance, McDonagh's professed reason for joining the military is to be like Linda Hamilton in The Terminator films.

All of the writing felt male. Outhwaite is often left to one side while the men in the cast act, though that could be because - as with Ross Kemp's early dramas - the producers cast very good actors in supporting roles.

Outhwaite, as a character bumped to the background, is possibly trying not to be the obvious star.

That is commendable, if it is what she is after, but it is also the only non-soap piece of acting she does.

She is first-rate in EastEnders and good luck to her in future roles. But there is a difference between unrehearsed soap acting and longer-form drama like this.

These dramas have to go deeper and faster. This all stays very much on the surface and, for something aiming to show off Outhwaite's skills, it does not task her very much.

No one has to work hard - not Outhwaite, not the viewers and seemingly not the writer, Patrick Harbinson.

It passes the time, which is all you can say for Red Cap.

Red Cap is on BBC One on Friday at 2130 GMT