I was only about two and a half when the U. K. experienced its coldest ever sustained winter freeze as 1962 moved into 1963, so obviously I don't remember it personally but it must have been something to experience back in the day.
Starting in December 1962, it persisted for three months, sparing no part of the country in its wake, contributing to a major train disaster, doubtless accounting for the lives of many others too, massively disrupting the British economy in the process. These were the days when there was no central heating and often no inside toilets and in time-honoured fashion, a number of sufficiently elderly lesser celebrities like Gloria Hunniford, Pete Waterman and Joanna Lumley are in hand to give us their random recollections of the times, along with weatherman John Kettley and a few other talking head experts to not always convincingly attempt to add some social and historical context to proceedings.
Thus we get some footage of Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, the Beatles and Mary Quant but claims that the Freeze changed the country forever seem a bit overblown to me. The weather is just the weather after all, something we accept as the backdrop to our lives for good and bad and to try to say it's more than that certainly overstates things in my view.
Comparisons are made with more recent bouts of severe cold weather, most notably the so-called "Beast from the East" of a few years ago which was chickenfeed compared to what we see here. I did appreciate seeing the historical news footage of frozen rivers, iced-over roads and the snow-blanketed countryside but as a documentary this felt rather thin and slight, providing a mere snow-shower rather than the full-blown blizzard of information I was anticipating.
Just as a footnote, watching it together, my wife made the observation that she was likely a Big-Freeze baby herself, so at least some good came out of it!