OT.....PBS America.

[harry]

Fairly new TV channel. Good documentaries. Quite a lot of repeats.

[Tim Streater]

I get it on Freesat although I've not watched it yet. Used to watch it in the States 30 years ago.

[Broadback]

A little more OT, as a freesat user where is the best place to get information on channels and programmes?

[Nightjar]

New to you, perhaps. However, PBS has been around since 1970 and PBS America has been available in the UK since 2011.

[Bod]

Hardly a new channel, Harry. It's been available on Freesat for years.

[harry]

Well it's just popped up on my screen.

[The Natural Philosopher]

[James Wilkinson]

Maybe he doesn't have freesat. Freeview and freesat are different.

[Bod]

Ok.

[alan_m]

It's been around a while.

They appear to have a set of programmes that they repeat endlessly for around two weeks. After the two weeks they have another set of programmes. The cycle seems to repeat for around 3 months before they start all over again.

I agree that there have been some good documentaries.

[Broadback]

Thanks for that NP, cheers

[Cursitor Doom]

Mine too. Never seen it on the menu until a few days ago.

[TimW]

Why would The Prayer Book Society of America have a television channel? TW

[Tim Streater]

[Davey]

When we lived in the US, it was the channel that provided a better view of the news than the major networks, and also showed some old familiar UK programming. It was indeed very good for documentaries. As a channel, it did at a minimum accept that there was a world outside of America.

A&E Channel and Discovery showed similar documentaries.

[Jethro_uk]

I enjoyed "History Detectives" and the long-series documentaries (Italian Americans and Prohibition).

The Prohibition one (5 1-hour programmes) is well worth watching as it did paint a much more nuanced picture of the events leading up to it. It's also quite strangely contemporary, in that it's only in the past

10,20 years that the US has really recovered from the hammer-blow of prohibition and has started to rediscover a real brewing heritage. The recent swell of "craft beers" may be of interest to beer fans of the 21st century, but would have been very familiar to the beer fans of the 19th century.

Plus ca change etc

[Jethro_uk]

Going back, I would have grumbled that - while good - they were terribly padded. You could have got the same "facts" in half the time.

Of course this is the way UK TV has gone, so it's a question of having to lump it :(

[Davey]

I saw the 'History Detectives', and indeed enjoyed that series. I never saw the other two you mention, but there was the Ken Burns series on The Civil War. He did others, but that was the one I liked best. We were living near Atlanta at the time, so there were several relevant places within reach.