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Going to Extremes (British TV series)

British Television Programme

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 10, 2026
Entity authorityQ16251906 ↗
Source-derived summary

Going to Extremes and Surviving Extremes are television programmes made for Channel 4 by Nick Middleton. In each episode of the two series, Middleton visited an extreme area of the world to find out how people have adapted to life there.

Both Going to Extremes and Surviving Extremes were accompanied by books of the same name, except in the USA where the latter was titled Extremes: Surviving the World's Harshest Environments.

There was also a third series, titled Going to Extremes: The Silk Routes.

Going to Extremes

In this series, Middleton visited the coldest, hottest, driest and wettest permanent settlements in the world.

Coldest

Oymyakon in Siberia, where the average winter temperature is −47 °F (− 44 °C).

Driest

Arica in Chile, where there had been fourteen consecutive years without rain. Fog is the only local source of water.

Wettest

Mawsynram in India, where average annual rainfall is 14 meters, falling within a four-month period in the monsoon season. The rainfall is approximately equal to that of its neighbor Cherrapunji.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “Going to Extremes (British TV series)” as british Television Programme. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Going, Extremes and British.

Editorial reviewA useful identification and reception guide that helps separate the work itself from editions, performances, ownership and later interpretation. The current 170-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Going, Extremes and British providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Going to Extremes (British TV series)”, the useful work is to connect “british Television Programme” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16251906. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Going to Extremes (British TV series)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Going to Extremes (British TV series) primary sources, Going to Extremes (British TV series) archive and Going research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Going to Extremes (British TV series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.