TV Tonight: Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon

Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon is on BBC One tonight at 9pm.

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Having honed their survival strategies over millennia, mammals have evolved to be masters of the cold. In this episode, we journey across the globe, exploring a frozen world, from icy seas to snow-capped mountains and meet the unique mammals that call them home. For most, the cold is a killer. But for mammals, with their unique physical traits like warm thick fur and rich nourishing milk, and remarkable behaviours like hibernation, conquering the cold is possible.

We begin our journey on the Arctic islands of Svalbard, where polar bears, synonymous with this cold archipelago, dominate this remote frozen world. But as their world warms, and the frozen seas that are their hunting grounds disappear, they are being forced to find new sources of food. For the first time, we follow a polar bear hunting on land as it heads high up into the mountains in a rarely seen long-distance pursuit of Svalbard’s reindeer.

Mammals have been forced to adapt to the cold for millions of years. Whereas other species avoided the series of thick ice sheets that once covered a quarter of all land, mammals were able to survive the freezing conditions, and by adapting their behaviour, many are now completely at home in these inhospitable lands.

One land that has little changed since the last ice age is the tundra of northern Alaska. In this remote, hostile landscape, a mythical and rarely seen mammal endures: the wolverine. They rely completely on snow to survive, providing them meat from animals that have succumbed to the cold and dens in which to raise their young. Whilst other animals either flee or hibernate to avoid the coldest time of year, they stay active all winter, traversing the vast landscape in search of food. This privileged view reveals a surprisingly caring side of a highly elusive animal.

Knowledge can play a huge role in surviving the cold. Rather than roaming huge distances, some smart mammals will return annually to places they know will provide them with food. In Canada’s northern Yukon, a unique community of bears has been passing knowledge down the generations of a special ice-free river. While most bears are already hibernating, this late flowing river allows chum salmon to spawn into the winter months, giving the bears an opportunity for one last feast before hibernation that they simply cannot resist.

Mammals’ ability to hibernate is a clever way to avoid winter, and deep underground in an abandoned mine, little and big brown bats are well into their hibernation. But not all stay asleep. One sneaky bat wakes in order to mate while the rest of the colony sleeps on.

Bringing newborns into a world of snow and ice has many challenges, but mammals’ unique ability to produce fat-rich milk allows harp seal mothers to have one of the shortest weening periods of all. In just 12 days, off the coast of Greenland, they race to fatten their pups to independence as the icy nursery melts around them.

Far above sea level, the remote Kluane Mountains of North America support the largest ice field outside the poles. In this rugged landscape of rock and ice, pika, a relative of the rabbit, patiently wait for summer. Having stayed awake all winter, surviving on food they collected last year, once summer does return, they will all have just a few weeks to harvest nearly a year’s worth of food before the winter lockdown begins again. But storing your hard-earnt supplies all in one place comes at a risk if you can’t trust your neighbour.

Averaging 4,000 meters above sea level, the thin air of the lofty mountains of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in China struggle to retain much heat at all. As a result, life here always feels cold. Snow leopards are the top predator and have lived here for millions of years, but recently their lives have become linked with humans and the domestic yak they herd. It’s too good an opportunity to ignore. But through a community initiative, they have found a way to live alongside each other, even when the yak are taken by the leopards.

Back at sea level, on the shores of Canada’s Hudson Bay, for mammals specialised for life in the cold, a warming world is now the biggest challenge. Here, arctic fox and polar bears wait together by open water where there should be ice. For arctic foxes living here, as food ashore runs out, they would normally move and follow the polar bears onto the ice in order to scavenge off the bears’ kills. But as the winter freeze, and arrival of the ice is delayed, the bears cannot hunt, and life becomes more and more desperate. This has led to the foxes resorting to cannibalism, desperately fighting with each other to feed on the unfortunate foxes that have succumbed to hunger.

Stacey and her gang – organiser Dilly, carpenter Rob and cleaner Iwan – challenge the Yates family to sort their life out in seven days. They will have to embark on a mammoth declutter, and the family will be asked to try to let go of half their possessions, so that the team can then beautifully reorganise their home.

With Stacey’s help, the family start packing all their possessions into boxes. Every single item is stripped from the family home, revealing just how much space there is under all their belongings. We get to know the family behind the clutter. Single mum Rachel lives with daughters Amelia (15) and Madeline (11) in the family home, where dance is a passion for all. Rachel works full-time while also making and designing intricate dance costumes in her limited number of free evenings. Both of the girls dance competitively, so it’s a busy household. The trio want to revitalise their home, which is full of clutter, including some of their dad Darren’s old stuff, which hasn’t been shifted since he and mum Rachel divorced six years ago.

With the house all packed up, the family’s possessions are laid out in a giant warehouse like an art installation of their entire lives, including 103 old planks of wood, 277 medals and 829 pieces of fabric.

With everything displayed in front of them, the family are shocked to see how much they own and are left to wonder how it all fitted into their house in the first place.

There are emotional moments as the family go through their most treasured items. Rachel invites ex-husband Darren to the warehouse to help sort through the items he left in the family home. And there is hope, by clearing through the clutter, that a home free of junk will better support her daughters’ neurodiversity, as Rachel discovers ways to let go of the items clogging up their lives.

At the house, carpenter Rob breathes new life into the home with some ingenious carpentry, creating an amazing dance studio for the girls, Iwan gives the home a supersized spring clean, with lots of useful tips along the way, and Dilly reorganises the bedrooms and the spare room to give Rachel the sewing room of her dreams.

When the family are left with only the must-keep items, they are packed back up to the house before it’s stylishly refilled by Stacey and her team, ready for the big reveal to the family. Have they really managed to transform this family home by decluttering, organising and upcycling alone?