Best News For Couch Potatoes
The History Channel and The Sci-Fi Channel
STAFF PICK: The best new things on our local televisions are actually old things. The recently added History Channel (Channel 40) brings the limited best the idiot box has ever offered in the way of documentaries and historical dramas. Thickly interspersed amongst the inevitable newsreels are terrific gems like the darkly riveting Reilly, Ace of Spies series, with Sam Neill as the real-life turn-of-the-century manipulator and superspy who came within a hairsbreadth of ruling Russia. Or feast your remote on former Monty Python transvestite and medieval scholar Terry Jones, with an hilarious and eye-opening revisitation of the Crusades.
From the best of TV we turn to the wonderfully worst: The Sci-Fi Channel's technocult trendiness can sometimes be wearisome, and many of the old shows exhumed were best left in the ground. But there's enough great stuff to make it worthwhile: interviews with seldom-seen SF icons like Harlan Ellison, and wonderfully campy, delightfully dated dramas like that long-absent triumph of 1960s British mod futurism, UFO, with its catsuited moonbabes and Nehru-jacketed starpilots battling alien invasion in the far future world of 1980.
When summer temperatures confine you to your domestic life-support system, there are worse ways of killing a midday hour or two than to treat yourself to the past that was and the future that wasn't.
Arts & Culture |
Cafés |
Chow |
City Life |
Kids |
Media Blitz
Music |
Outdoors |
Shopping |
Spirits