 Frozen Planet (BBC One) Mummifying alan: Egypt's Last Secret (Channel 4) at the bottom of my garden is a wrongness, a brightness - a patch of milky-green yellow that shouldn't be there. The primroses are out; confused.  They should be underground until March.  Under the apple tree, the narcissi and daffodils are coming up - expecting april; finding October. The tree itself has pink blossom next to red fruit; as joltingly wrong as a pregnant child, or a plane falling to earth. The earth is still fidgety and mild, when it should, by now, be silent under frost. It still feels loud out there. There's a conversation going on. I can hear it every time I look out of the window at the long lawn; the insanity of damask roses lolling on the pergola at Hallowe'en. We've jumped straight from summer to spring. all that greenness is ... shouting.  On Frozen Planet Sir David attenborough stands at the South Pole in a red thermal jacket that makes him as wide as he is tall. Under a white-lamp sun "that never rises high enough in the sky to warm my back", attenborough explains that his final epic series is about the frozen places of the world: "Places that seem to be borrowed from fairytales."  We are here "to witness its wonders: perhaps for the last time".  For as the opening credits of Frozen Planet rise on the screen - accompanied by low, slightly dissonant brass - there can scarcely be a viewer unaware of the context: the world is cooking. Even prominent sceptics such as the physicist Richard a. Muller are worried: reviewing climatic data to disprove global warming, Muller found that - contrary to what he had desired - the evidence proving that it was alarming, and this week wrote a quietly terrifying piece in The Wall Street Journal that concluded: "You should not be a sceptic. Not any longer."  The frozen planet that Frozen Planet covers, then, is smaller than the frozen planet we had even 20 years ago.  "What happens here - in these remote, ice-crusted caps - affects us all, whereever we are," attenborough says, braced against an antarctic wind that, within our lifetime, has started to blow over lukewarm water instead of ice.  But facts such as these would be focusing on the awful, drowning, catastrophic pity of global warming. What Frozen Planet does is even more affecting than that. It shows us what we will lose in terms of the awe and beauty of these places - the magic of being on a planet topped and tailed with these outrageous landscapes; white like teeth and cloud and pearl; wild like ecstacy, or the moon. Heaped, blown, billowing snow: a world of fatal ice cream, punctuated by volcanoes and aqua meltlakes, and penguins leaping out of wave foam like girls out of a cake.  God, look at this! a break in the ice no bigger than the average municipal swimming pool - this could be the baths in Bexley, or Bilston - and six killer whales facing up out of the water, giant heads split with teeth, jostling for space like Year 5 kids at a swimming lesson. Their scale is dizzying - you could sit in their mouths. Their design is sharp: black and white, in simple curves, they'd look good on a record sleeve, or as a tile.  The orca are here for one of the natural world's signature manoeuvres - combining "extreme play" with "lunch". The menu consists of a seal on a raft of ice: as long as the seal is on the ice, the orca can't get it - however often their huge, toothed faces snap. So, like the cast of Reservoir Dogs made out of wet PVC, they surge, black and white and fatal, rocking the ice until it flips. The seal looks like a mum on a lilo in Lanzarote, being hassled by the kids: it looks as if it's about to shout: "Stop mucking around, Cameron - you'll get my hair wet!" before flip, snap - it's in the water, under the water, split between the pack: lunch.  You won't believe where they've got cameras filming this: on the ice, overhead, in the water, between the orca - at one point a whale's tail slaps the camera as all six weave around. anyone who had ever seen killer whales like this before would have been very cold, and, six seconds later, very dead. It's like the kind of show that they have at SeaWorld - but wild, live, in a landscape as plain, white and potent as an empty page.  Frozen Planet roamed across both poles, showing us new and astonishing things every six minutes - like an excited child showing off its toys on Christmas Day. Look! another! and another! and another!  Underground snow-crystal caves; mountains crumbled to skeletons by antarctic storms; 100-year-old pines bent double, swathed in never-melting, white fox-fur snow. and in the water - as bright and blue as the Pacific - creatures that looked like they'd fallen out of Gothic fairytales: a sea spider half a metre across that looked like eight orange pencils; icefish; woodlice the size of dinner plates. Things that looked like winged babies, falling into the dark.  In this white, wondrous world, attenborough became rhapsodic. as Greenland thawed, an aerial shot showed a whole country turning into a gushing Olympic luge course and he sighed in sated amazement: "The water courses through an icy delta, like blood along the arteries of a coldblooded monster. a monster that is ... stirring."  attenborough is a vitaphile. Life, all life - all energy and motion - fascinates him. as Van Gogh saw the night sky whirl above him, attenborough sees the Earth seethe and the ice grind, and the meat pulse under the fur. He knows so much - miles underground, millions of years back - that when we travel with him, we, too, become omnitemporal, 3-D, thrilled. He has a way of hitting you with a thought that can leave you thinking for days. It may have been 42 years since Neil armstrong first walked on the Moon, but it was only 58 years before that that Roald amundsen first left his footprint at the South Pole - "coming inland over the highest, driest and coldest mountains on Earth", as attenborough puts it. Getting to the pole was almost as hard as catapulting ourselves free of gravity and on to another heavenly body. The ice is as titanic, brutal, alien and kaleidoscopic as the sky. We press against the iron hardness and know what we are.  Not that we even have to get to the poles for this kind of wonder. again, look - here is attenborough showing us snowflakes as they form, in dazzling close-up; each blooming around a mote of dust. Crackling and feathering like a diamond etching on a windowpane, falling across the screen like frizzled stars. attenborough claims that there are no two alike, and while I'm going to have to call him up on that one - I've thought about it and it's just not that likely, love - you are, once again, joy-struck: snow falls on Dudley, and dogs, and the seafront in Brighton. Frozen Planet comes here. and - while it still lies solid, and white, above and below us - we go to the frozen planet, with David attenborough. While it still lies there.  From life to death, with Channel 4's big show of the week: Mummifying alan: Egypt's Last Secret, where an all-expert team pulled together to mummify the body of alan Billis, a 61-year-old taxi driver from Torquay.  Previously, the superlative mummification methods of the 18th Dynasty have been undocumented and wholly mysterious.  after 18 years of research, however, the archaeological chemist Stephen Buckley claims that he has finally cracked their method. "We need salt, beeswax and natural oils," he said, briskly - leading the viewer to exclaim: "Hang on! You're going to Lush Bath Bomb alan into immortality? Why not chuck in some tiny dried rosebuds and gli 