Editor-At-Large: Lord of the Ringlets - Frodo's bad hair day and the cruelty of C-list celebrity

My verdict on Lord of the Rings: great costumes, top-rate design, shame about the hair. Frodo, his hapless pal Sam, the hobbits Merry and Pippin, Alec Guinness look-alike Bernard Hill (King Theoden), and Legolas, a flaxen-plaited elf, all endure the worse wigs I've sat through in a long time. Leave aside the baffling plot, the endless battles, and the spoken twaddle of this second part of the trilogy, The Two Towers, portrays a brilliantly realised mystical world, with fabulous scenery and wonderfully creepy creatures. But why do film-makers find conveying future hair and make-up so challenging? This film contains all sorts of homages to Star Wars, such as the carefully plotted hierarchy in battle. The director has paid a lot of attention to conveying status via uniforms, just as the original Star Wars designer, John Mollo, a military expert, did. And the computer-generated Gollum is a captivatingly weird sidekick for the two central characters. But, in Middle Earth, hair styling has stopped at roughly AD1200, and so men all have slightly bouffant luxuriant curly wigs or the option of long straight manes with little Arthurian plaits.

In Star Wars, comedy moments revolved around R2D2, and the bar at the end of the universe. In The Two Towers the reptilian Gollum has to be entertaining and dangerous – and his bare head plastered with straggling locks (a hair success story) is both pitiful and repellent. Hair does matter, even when you've got a cast of thousands engaged in battle in a landscape several miles across. Who can forget how poor Princess Leia had to labour through Star Wars with her hair twisted into a couple of telephone receivers on her head? Now the curse of duff movie hair has struck again, and even Sir Ian McKellen is lumbered with an enormously long white beard and matching mane that just screams Christmas panto.

I sat through the premiere, waiting an hour in the cinema for the proceedings to start, marvelling at what "celebrities" wear to these occasions on freezing cold winter nights. The answer is, the more C-list the celeb, the more summer and winter wear have melded into one look: a strappy dress with a lot of cleavage, long straight blond hair, bare legs and high-heeled sandals. Do these females have minders hiding around the corner with sensible footwear and duffel-coats? In their quest to please the paparazzi, do they invest in flu jabs and thermal G-strings? I just ask because there's a special frontless, backless, split frock that designers from Julien Macdonald to Maria Grachvogel churn out that has nothing to do with the business of sitting through a three-hour movie and eating a bag of crisps, but everything to do with double-sided Sellotape holding your bits in place for two minutes of photography. Given the length of the film, more appropriate garb would be a baggy tracksuit and loose slippers, with a rucksack containing a substantial takeaway dinner.

And what happens to the amazing designer outfits the female stars have to pop on to ensure front-page coverage? Liv Tyler wore Donna Karan in New York, Stella McCartney in London and Alexander McQueen in Paris, all within a week. Does she have to hand them back, or are these frocks auctioned for homeless elves? More importantly, does the poor woman have to sit through the film every time? Or is she whisked away through a back exit for supper before she has to appear at the post-film party looking gracious? The logistics of these lavish PR-driven evenings are fascinating. But when downmarket newspaper critics start telling us that this is one of the great films of all time, I think we can assume the hype has paid off.

A lonely death

The sad death last week of the artist and writer Margaret Davies will seem almost inconceivable to most people. Here was a highly intelligent and creative adult who chose to leave her family and friends in September and journey to the most remote part of the British Isles, completing the final part alone across inhospitable mountains and moorland on foot. She had placed notices begging for food in the window of the isolated bothy near Cape Wraith in Sutherland, and was found emaciated and close to death by two shepherds. The nearest house was 12 miles away. Margaret died two days later in hospital. She'd previously camped alone in many isolated places including Afghanistan, Alaska, Nepal and Canada, painting and writing about her experience of solitude. Having spent months at a time walking hundreds of miles through England and Wales, I can relate to the addictive nature of being by yourself in an unforgiving environment. After being filmed for five consecutive days, I would long for the time when I could walk up mountains for up to 12 hours at a time alone. It has never struck me as dangerous, but spending day after day alone does warp your sense of reality. You get bound up in the landscape and become determined to leave trails and footpaths behind. I still get people to drop me miles from my cottage on the Yorkshire Dales, so I can walk back in a straight line using just a compass. The worse the weather, the more I like it. When I filmed Ffyona Campbell completing her round-the-world walk on the section from Algeciras to John O'Groats I came to the conclusion that a lot of her irrationality stemmed from spending day after day alone. A few years later I was filming in the Brecon Beacons when someone brought me the wrong sandwich, a disgusting coleslaw thing made with white bread instead of the smoked salmon on wholemeal I'd been anticipating for four hours. I threw the offending item on the ground and jumped up and down on it. Too much of your own company creates a kind of madness – at least that was my excuse. If Margaret had been able to countenance time with a companion, Sutherland would have ended very differently.

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So goodbye to weekend evenings slumped in front of the TV soaking up the frocks, the sex and the hats in Daniel Deronda and Doctor Zhivago. No matter that the leading ladies didn't age much more than from 15 to 22 over a 20-year period, or that both leading men were such hapless wets. At least women reclaimed peak-time viewing. I imagine that both broadcasters were disappointed with the ratings, averaging roughly 26 per cent of the audience for Deronda and 29 per cent for Zhivago. These are expensive offerings for a return of six to seven million viewers, and it could be that both sagas didn't sustain three episodes. Even though this was pallid fare compared with BBC2's wonderful version of Thérèse Raquin a few years ago, I was still grateful. You won't be surprised to discover that it's back to the tried and tested with Poirot on ITV tonight, and last night presented the scintillating choice of Jonathan Ross and the comedy awards on ITV, a repeat of Only Fools and Horses on BBC1, and wall-to-wall snooker on BBC2.