That's just sad.

These days when I go to The History Channel On-Demand listings looking for something to watch, there ain't no history. It's ALL this crap - aliens, lumberjacks, swap meet geeks and...pawn shops!

I did get a laugh out of the last one. Somewhere on the internet, a perceptive critic described Pawn Stars as: "Sort of like 'Antiques Roadshow' on PBS. Only with a bunch of loud, fat assholes."

The new H2 history channel (formerly History International) seems to be a little better, running some actual history stuff now and then.

But a lot of the real history has been dumped into the HisChan bargain basement - the Military Channel. That one doesn't even rate an HD channel, at least on my system. Strictly low-def, up there in the listings with QVC and the Christer channels.

MilChan has been running a great series called "Nazi Collaborators." It runs the gamut from the big names (Vidkun Quisling, Pierre Laval) to average people who collaborated with the Nazis for various reasons.

It's educational and thought-provoking, so I'm sure it will disappear real soon.

Simply because it's what gets viewers, most people simply are not smart enough to enjoy anything requiring intellectual depth.

There's one program on one of the Discovery Channels which (according to the ads) consists of a guy with an industrial strength chain saw cutting through objects "to see how they work". Couldn't he just take the top off like anyone else?

Sorry i can't be more accurate about the name of the show. I simply refuse to watch such s**t.

Almost all the available historic video (film) was from WWII, so they pretty much concentrated on what was available. It actually wasn't bad.

Then, things changed. Wasn't it the History Channel which featured championship poker? (actually not a bad program, it didn't take itself too seriously.)