Once was a time when watching The Learning Channel in Canada meant lapping up the delightful erudition of Desmond Morris or James Burke alternately musing with their profound intellects on human nature or the crazy criss-crosses of history.
If one were lucky (and young and desperately horny), one might even catch some filthy “scientific” show about sex.
Today, however, I sit in front of my television, watch channel 34 and think, “What the fuck am I learning?”
World’s Biggest Explosions—Captured on Tape! A program which shows, among other things, a rocket fuel factory in the desert liquefying itself and buildings around it when something went horribly wrong.
Thankfully, someone managed to do something horribly right, capturing the entire thing on video.
Caught on Tape—television which convinces you that God not only likes to get drunk, but does so more often than you think, and that he especially likes to find Americans with camcorders to harass while doing it.
Then there are the animal shows, which almost uniformly follow the format of people getting bitten, attacked, and/or maimed. What makes these truly fascinating, however, is the range of fauna involved; from squirrels to sharks, I am entranced.
And what about the fighting robot shows? At one time, this seemed like a good idea.
Then there were two of them.
Then there were even more, some spinning off into different formats, supporting the moribund careers of former Red Dwarf actors and other assorted sci-fi and WWF burnouts.
Or in the case of Junkyard Wars, suffering the fate of The Weakest Link—being an altered facsimile superior to the original, but which would never eclipse its predecessor for reasons of timing.
So what have I learned?
Don’t back up on a highway, stay the hell away from camcorders, and unless you distinctly hear a voiceover describing your miraculous rescue and/or recovery in the replay of some event involving you, you didn’t make it out alive.
