Television and learning go together, in the minds of many, like heavy cream and anchovies.
But there are islands containing valuable information amid the innuendo and inanity. One of the best of them is The Learning Channel, a cable service devoted largely to documentaries on topics that, on their face, are too dull even for PBS.
TLC, a sister network of the Discovery Channel, has carved a comfortable niche for itself by being unafraid to try to turn the prosaic into something approximating the poetic.
Not everyone, of course, needs to see a documentary about Korean War uniform manufacture, to invent an only slightly exaggerated example. But just as it is nice to know that there are men and women whose hobby is watching airplanes land, it is comforting to know that seemingly arcane information is out there to be gleaned without reading a book or doing original research.
The network’s unfortunate name may make it sound like castor oil television, but often enough TLC turns out something that tastes more like olive oil.
This is especially true of its “Understanding” series, programs that pick apart a single subject for an hour at a time, leaving viewers a little better educated about their world.
And this weekend, TLC, taking a cue from the rock-music field, assembles 18 of the “Understandings” in a summertime event it calls a festival. Having just attended, and quickly fled, the popular music festival known as the Guinness Fleadh, I can assure you that this is a better organized event, with actual sightlines, confirmed starting times and, depending on how big your household is, only minimal waits for food.
The “Understanding Festival” stretches from 8 a.m. Saturday to 2 a.m. Sunday, covering topics including electricity (1 p.m.), uncertainty (3 p.m.), sex (5 p.m.) and time (6 p.m.).
Included in the mix are two premieres, examining bridges and memory. The bridge documentary (8 p.m.), sent out to reviewers in an unfinished version, features lots of great video of spans being blown up, intentionally, and conversation with the demolition men. The great phrase used is “structural euthanasia.” It looks to be a satisfying hour for anybody inordinately fascinated by infrastructure.
The “Mysteries of Memory” hour (9 p.m.) is more generally intriguing. It takes as its unifying theme how little-comprehended the mechanism of memory is.
Some basics, however, are known. There are multiple types of memory, for instance: The implicit type covers things we know by heart, such as that WMAQ-Ch. 5 is the local NBC station, and explicit includes things we have not completely assimilated, such as that Jerry Springer has moved over from WMAQ to WFLD-Ch. 32.
And memories are not stored in one place in the brain. The example is of an elephant, whose trunk may reside in one corner while its color rests in another. It is only in the process of recall that the brain reassembles the many component parts of the memory.
Recovered memory, a great controversy of psychiatric practice in recent years, is given some support here: A man had a dream and recalled being molested at camp. When he confronted the counselor, the memory was proved true.
But the documentary also demonstrates, just as vividly, that such memories can be implanted by unscrupulous or inept therapists. A woman who rent her closely knit family after accusing her father, a minister, of years of molestation finally began to doubt herself. When a medical exam confirmed she was a virgin, she recanted.
The unreliability and susceptibility to suggestion of memory has profound implications for the criminal justice system, where eyewitness accounts are held sacred. They are also, often, dead wrong, as the recent rash of DNA testing resulting in convictions being overturned has shown.
“People’s memory for the gist of things is generally accurate,” says one expert. “People’s memory for the specifics is often terrible and sometimes totally invented.”
The show’s dramatic recreations of events, including the molestations, are unnecessarily lurid, but otherwise this is television that is not only good, but good for you.
– Howie out of the Box: Another talk program, “The Howie Mandel Show,” debuted Monday, despite no apparent clamor either for another such show or, specifically, for the conversation of Howie Mandel (4 p.m. weekdays, WGN-Ch. 9).
Taped in Johnny Carson’s old “Tonight” studio, it is a strange but intriguing thing. Mandel’s personality, borderline-savant itself, is exceptionally on-edge for daytime TV, as words seemingly can’t wait to flow out of him.
It can make things a little disquieting for his guests, who included Jennifer Aniston, Jay Leno and the man who seemingly makes his living these days as a first-week visitor to new talk shows, Arsenio Hall (showing a clip from, anachronistically, “Coming to America”).
But the general tenor is a Rosie O’Donnell-style chumminess, and Mandel showed a real talent for Lettermanesque role-playing in a pretaped bit where he pretended to be a less-than-conscientious valet parker.
I’m not sure it will catch on, and it certainly is not necessary. But it is interesting to watch, and Mandel, amusingly self-conscious about having a talk show, is much more likable here than in his too-antic standup comedy.
