We've been hard on History Television for its crappy programming and lack of sense of what a historical channel could be. Scroll down a little to see.
But good television can happen on bad networks. I happened to catch some of Ancestors in the Attic last nights. It's on History Television at 8 pm where I live -- check local listings, as they say.
Host Jeff Douglas is channelling George Stromboupoulos pretty hard, and the roller-coaster editing is trying to make your head spin. ("Yo, Jeff! Switch to decaf, man" my kids were saying) But it's a show about a bunch of genealogists, and it takes the genuine interest many Canadians have in the lives and backgrounds of our ancestors and makes lively, engaging television out of it. It gets out in the Canadian landscape to do it, too, even if some of those landscapes are cemetaries. Into some strikingly non-dusty archives and research institutes, too, despite that patronizing "attic" in the title.
All this is the opposite of what History Television generally offers. This is people genuinely interested in the historical work they do, speaking to an audience that shares that interest. Good on them. And on the film company "Primitive Entertainment" that makes the program.
