Here’s the thing about history: it doesn’t date. Yes, there are new discoveries, fashions and insights, but in general, it doesn’t matter whether you watched a documentary series about ancient Egypt last weekend or five years ago. Knowledge well presented is its own virtue.
It doesn’t always look that way to conventional TV broadcasters, Andy Taylor, co-founder of digital distributor Little Dot Studios, told the Guardian in 2017. Factual history programming had “fallen out of favour with some traditional broadcasters”, he told the paper, and at the same time “boomed on digital platforms across all age groups. History content is an important part of our business.”
Taylor was interviewed because his company (which is, in turn, owned by All3Media and thus a stablemate of our own South Pacific Pictures) had just bought History Hit, the video and podcast network founded in 2014 by Dan Snow.
Snow, the Oxford-educated son of BBC journalist Peter Snow, told the Guardian he’d launched his venture because he feared history was being “dumbed down” by broadcasters in search of ratings. He said that “there was an audience for high-quality history, told by the world’s best historians, which was not being served by the traditional media”.
You can judge for yourself on History Hit TV, available via the app on your smart TV or device or at historyhit.com.
For $6.99 a month, you’ll get a curated library of factual history programming, organised by era and theme. Most of it has previously aired on TV somewhere, but there’s a growing stock of modestly budgeted original content, which has delivered History Hit’s first real star, Going Medieval host Dr Eleanor Janega.
An American with a mile-wide Chicago accent, Janega teaches medieval history at the London School of Economics and has a particular interest in the histories of gender and sexuality. She’s also very probably the first TV historian to do her work in leather trousers.
But there’s more. Little Dot farms about 600 YouTube channels and a cluster of those, from Parable (“the home of religious history documentaries”) to Absolute History (“fun, shocking and curious tales from throughout history”), form the History Hit network.
It adds thousands of hours of programming, some edited into snackable chunks, some strung together. (Dr Joann Fletcher’s passionate Immortal Egypt series is there as a single four-hour video.)
Yes, they’re all there with permission – YouTube is now part of the life cycle of a documentary. They earn money through advertising, but you might wish to consider paying $6.99 a month for YouTube Premium Lite to skip the ads.
It’s quite a game-changer. Avoid the more expensive YouTube Premium, which comes with a music-streaming service you probably don’t need.
How does it compare with “proper” television? Well, the history-related programmes being promoted by the Sky channels recently are Rise of the Nazis, Hitler’s Engineers, Secrets in the Ice and, er, UFO Witness (“Who are the aliens flying these craft? And what do they want with our planet?”).
A dive into the Middle Ages may seem quite attractive.
For something different: A trio of very bright young men walk into fringe situations with a camera and make themselves so unthreatening (it helps that they look about 15) that their subjects drop their guard. That’s The Department of Information, the YouTube channel run by Auckland students Gryffin Cook, Louis Macalister and Noah Ferguson-Dudding.
They’ve interviewed antivaxxers, awkwardly partied at an Australian “bush doof” and accompanied “New Zealand’s most notorious graffiti gang” on a run.
It’s both entertaining and revealing.
