As I remember, the Airfix Discovery is quite a nice kit.
I went on board the real ship once, in (I think) 1978, when she was moored in the Thames. At that time it looked as though she'd been pretty much neglected for quite a few years. I believe she's been moved since then, into one of the London Docks. [Later edit: Oops. She's now the pride of Dundee, Scotland.]
I recall reading, a long time ago, an article about her in the grand old magazine Model Shipwright. The author had made a very small-scale diorama showing her stuck in the ice.
One interesting detail I remember clearly. She had a big midships deckhouse, which contained the helm and a lot of sensitive navigational instruments. Most of her standing rigging was wire (as was typical in that era), but it was feared that iron wire in the vicinity of those instruments would mess them up. So her mainmast standing rigging was old-fashioned hemp. The point is significant for the modeler because it meant that the mainmast rigging was disproportionately heavier than that of the fore- and mizzenmasts.
There's an old British movie, "Scott of the Antarctic," starring John Mills. It's an early color film; as I remember it has a few brief shots of the Discovery under sail. Most of the story deals with the later Terra Nova exhibition, when Scott and his party abandoned theif ship and tried to make their way to the South Pole on foot and by sled. The photography is spectacular, and the finale, in which everybody slowly freezes to death, must be one of the dreariest in the history of movie-making. I first saw it on late night tv when I was getting over an operation. I didn't know how it was going to end, and it sent me into a state of near-clinical depression that lasted several days.
On the other hand, as a bonus to the movie you get the music, by Ralph Vaughn Williams. He later reworked the score into his Seventh Symphony, "Symphony Antarctica."
One approach to the Airfix kit would be to make it a waterline model, surround it with ice and snow, and build a little tape player or MP3 "device" into it to play excerpts from the symphony. If done well enough, such a diorama could make everybody within earshot feel like jumping off a cliff.