History Channel - I get the distinct feeling it's English

caoibhin wrote: »

Actually, its a myth that the English "stole" our trees. Ireland as an island has been inhabited by people who removed trees for agricultural practices for the past 2k years.

The country had a tree cover of about 20% in the 16th century so the notion that the English stole out trees is daft. The remainder of the forestswere indeed cleared during the Famine for fuel wood.

Never mentioned the English stealing our trees, but being as you know so much about it, I would suggest that you work on that programme with your team, and we'll collect a few more experts to cover the rest of the listings.

I can get my uncle to do a programme relating to his childhood arson, where he "accidentally" torched a small plantation. I think that his crime happened so long ago that it is probably statute-barred.

I'm amazed that you're upset that a channel broadcasting to the British should have an excess of programmes focussing on British history. We only get the station over here as part of the NTL/UPC or Sky package as an add-on in the same way we get CNN, TV5 Monde etc. It doesn't come as much of a shock to me to find so much emphasis on US news on CNN and so much darned French material on TV5 since neither are places I expect to find Irish programming. We have our own stations like TV3 for that. Oh, hang on...

learnerplates wrote: »

History presented [on] tv cannot be purely based on fact can it?

Typically, no, it isn't. But it could aspire to be more like actual history.

History presented in books... cannot be purely based on fact can it?

That's sort of the idea. Actually it's a simplistic way to state it. Often, huge time and effort is expended arguing about how to interpret something just to establish a matter of fact about things.

So what it turns out is that most so called "facts" of history are disputable. The facts are elusive. Many "matters of fact" that you are given in History Channel documentaries are likely to be embellished in their factual status, and disputable by established scholars in the field.

So it's not that history, as written, is "based on facts" that are always there to look at, available to us. It's that history is often the process of trying to render up facts to posterity. We have to go to our source, and establish what is a matter of fact, and what is likely from them, and argue our findings. And then they are vetted by the academy.

So no. History isn't "based on fact". It's based on textual and other sorts of evidence. But as for the spirit of your question - within academic history, it is looked down upon to make stuff up, or embellish the facts, just to have a laugh, or to play things up to an audience. In history, you're after truth, not entertainment value.

surely the producers must include some of the of their own prejudice, this is human nature after all.

History books aren't written by producers.
Writers of history do, yes, often employ their prejudices - in terms of their intuitions in their assessment of the evidence. The status of their prejudices rests on presenting their argument so as to make a compelling case for their interpretation of the evidence. This is the academic process.

The History channel doesn't do this. They present a continuous narrative, as if it were all fact, often playing up the disaster factor, or the drama factor. This is presented to the lay viewer as fact - not as a construal of the facts which is offered to the academic community for assessment. There is no "this is my take on the evidence" notice - instead it's just presented as "this is what happened." So the risk is that those concealed prejudices will be taken up by the lay public as fact, rather than contribute to an ongoing discussion on the evidence.

History Channel is entertainment, if it wasn't it wouldn't be on the tv.

I seem to recall rather good, diverting documentaries on the BBC, which didn't misconstrue the nature of the historic discipline, and which managed to be downright educational into the bargain. There's a difference between being mildly historied up by what is basically an entertainment programme, and mildly entertained by what is as basis a historical documentary.

The producers will then include their own interpretation of the facts and dramatise it, that's life.

No. That's the perversion/exploitation of history for commercial gain. It's not history. I for one am rather glad we don't have that perverting our national history.

Also I have no issue with reinactments I find them very entertaining.

Good. Why don't you watch pure drama, then? Movies about historical periods and wars? The production values are typically much much better, the choreography is often more imaginative. The cinematography more seamless - the drama written in such a way as to make the voice over obsolete. It's really very good you know. Or do you just prefer that nebulous, erroneous, "history feel" that history channel docs give you - that grainy camera, nervous extras in military uniforms etc etc.

Because you know, there's about as much fact to Hollywood movies as there is to this stuff.

I watched a few minutes of a History Channel doc about Cleopatra recently, and the producers had come up with, what I suppose they thought was, an extremely clever conceit - a forensic criminal investigation into the murder of Cleopatra. (!) So the main presenter, who was presented as some manner of "expert" but who quickly turned out to be very much a hack mooned around a bit making wild conjectures on the basis of very little evidence - (a cursory reading of one or two of the primary source texts - as if it was something special to consult such arcane tomes - you can only find Penguin Classics translations in every bookshop in the world, ready for first year undergraduates to read) and then decided to go to Rome to build a case against her "prime suspect" - Octavius. Rome! Where the hell was she going to go to find "forensic evidence" in the Capital city of Italy, that isn't already frequented by numerous scholars who are better placed to make a pronouncement on this?

So there was a little montage shot of her travel arrangements, during which she voiced over a little "preparation talk" for the Rome segment. She tried to fill us in on the basics - who Octavius was, where Rome is, what the state of the Republic was at the time, etc. She talked a bit about Octavius - telling us that when he became emperor he took on the name Augustus, because his pivotal victory against Antony had been in the month of August. (!)

Now, for someone who knows a bit about this, the notion of calling Augustus "emperor" is misleading in itself. Augustus status as the First of Rome is complex, and the office of Princeps had not yet assumed the status that we'd all recognize as that of a Roman emperor. Augustus was making it up as he went along, laying down foundations. And his powers and official status were constantly in flux. But this is trifling really, in the scheme of things, so just ignore this.

The real howler is the idea that he took his name, "Augustus," after the month of August. It's the other way around, for God's sake. There were ten months in the Roman calendar first of all, and the fifth and sixth were called Quintillis and Sextilis, respectively. Then, in 700BC, supposedly, according to semi-mythical accounts, Numa Pompilius inserted two more months, January and February, at the beginning of the year. Sextilis and Quintilis became the seventh and eighth months of the year.

In 8BC, he renamed Quintilis to "July", after his adopted father Julius Caesar, because it was the month in which Caesar had been borne, and he renamed Sextilis to "August" after himself, because that was a month in which several pivotal victories had been won that led to his preeminence in the Roman state. This continued a tradition of naming months after the gods, since previously January, March, April, May and June had been derived from the names of gods.

All of this is why, from much changed Latin, September means seventh month, October means eighth month, November means ninth month, and December means tenth month.

Anyway, I was so disgusted I turned it off. It was obvious to me that the programme wasn't about history - it was about trying to fit history into a narrow Dan Brown style conceit, and to hell with fidelity to the truth. The idea that this hack could brazenly reel off a list of supposed "facts" without being vetted by her producers was pretty telling. How could this woman get to present a history doc without any putative qualifications? How could she be in the position of informing a public about a subject she's mostly ignorant of? The likelihood is that many of the producers on these shows haven't a f*cking clue about history. They probably produce Cops clones in their spare time.

So which is it that you like, then? Do you want to be entertained by a sort of amateurish, badly produced fiction, which yet pretends to be history just to make it seem truthful, or do you want to actually learn stuff? Because if it's the latter, you ought to stop watching this trash. And if it's the former, I don't see why you don't just go knock yourself out with fully fledged entertainment-history-porn, and watch King Arthur, or The Mystic Knights of Tir na nOg, or some such.

I for one would like to see documentaries based on fact produced on Irish history, and presented on the History channel, that's all.

Good for you. Thankfully though, it hasn't been deemed viable enough to make a go of it. Which for me indicates that, according to market research for the History channel and its ilk, Irish viewers aren't nearly so partial to history-trash as English ones. So I suppose you're in a minority.