Look how tough my job is! (History Channel)

Member Name: thehonesttruth

Product:	History Channel
Date:	19/10/09 (40 review reads)
Rating:

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I love History - anything ranging from the Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, ranging through the Tudors, the Stuarts, and famous criminals like Jack the Ripper, to more recent history - Suffragettes, the two World Wars , and Martin Luther King .

So, you'd think that the History Channel would be right up my street wouldn't you ? And, you'd be wrong . This channel can be found on Virgin Media 234, and on Sky 529, with both having +1 channels allowing you to view programmes an hour later .

So, why would a history lover like me NOT like this channel - well, the answer is simple - a vastly unbalanced selection of programmes, and far too many repeats.

Lets start with a few programmes that REALLY get my goat : Ice Road Truckers , Ax Men, Americas Toughest Jobs, The Universe, and Expedition Africa. The astute amongst you have probably already picked up that these have very little to do with history , and you'd be absolutely right . Most of these shows are simply documentaries showing people doing admittedly tough jobs under admittedly tough circumstances, and while they are perfectly good documentary programmes, they are NOT history, and would be more suited to a channel such as Discovery.

Then, we get onto the actual History bit of the channel (because to be fair, they do show some history programmes .) The problem is, they tend to spend a lot of time focusing on two particular areas of history, namely World War Two, and Henry VIII. And often, they'll do this by showing the same programmes repeatedly thoughout any given week. Now, I can appreciate the current Henry VIII obsession with it being 500 years this year since he came to the throne of England, so I'll let that one slide .

But the War has been done to death - and I'm getting just a tad sick of seeing Hitler goose-stepping onto my screen - especially when in most cases the series has been shown in full just a couple of weeks before . I appreciate it is important history - but so is everything else that went before it!

The channel does occasionally squeeze some really interesting show in - I particularly enjoyed watching a very detailed programme about the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' that absolutely fascinated me . And the Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire series is wonderfully rich and detailed . And more recently, there has been a brilliant show about executioners - how they came to do their jobs and how the various execution methods were developed .

But, this makes just a couple of decent history programmes in a week otherwise filled with stuff about people chopping down trees, moving big structures, and working on oil rigs , briefly interrupted by Hitler shouting a lot .

As a channel, it could be wonderful if it scrapped the 'Look how tough and manly my job is' programmes and provided a better mix . At the moment though, I'm lucky to find a couple of hours of decent tv to watch a week on this channel .

2 star

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