
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 9, 1995                   TAG: 9506090064
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S BEEN A WONDERFUL DECADE OF DISCOVERY

Johnny Carson watches it; he told me so. Steven Spielberg watches it; he told me, too. Elizabeth Taylor, Brad Pitt, Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Winfield all reportedly watch it. It sounds like something worth watching - and often, that's exactly what the Discovery Channel is.

The Discovery Channel was launched on a shoestring in 1985, dedicating itself to ``the uniquely human journey of exploration and innovation'' with an array of nonfiction programming on subjects ranging from sea anemones to Watergate. Ten years later, it is a thriving success and one of the few channels the cable industry can truly point to with pride.

To celebrate its first decade, the channel has slapped together a sampler of clips, which is the way anniversaries are usually celebrated in television. ``Great Moments of Discovery'' premieres Sunday night at 9. Tune in for fascinating phenomena and wondrous sights.

Unfortunately, there's also lots of self-promotional blather for the Discovery Channel. Such celebrities as Walter Cronkite, Sen. John Glenn, and Sherry Stringfield (of NBC's ``E.R.'') filmed brief testimonials that are sprinkled throughout the show. Even John Tesh shows up, philosophizing that thanks to the Discovery Channel, ``we're all a little wiser to the consequences of history.''

Enduring this blah-blah-blah is the price one pays for watching the show, although it will also include 30 minutes of outright commercials within its two-hour time span. Fairly insufferable, too, is somber sportscaster Bob Costas, who serves as the show's host. ``The heart beats, the lungs heave, but memories are the stuff of life,'' intones Bob as he introduces a clip about the brain.

Oh for heaven's sakes, Bob, lighten up. Stop heavin' them lungs and get on with the show!

The most absorbing parts of the program, predictably, are clips from the nature films that are Discovery's most popular attractions. Sharks, especially, have done big business for the channel, which devotes a week of prime time each year to films about the fearsome predators. Among the excerpts on ``Great Moments'': a Great White tries to gobble up a steel shark cage off the coast of Australia, a camera goes through those infamous jaws and right down a shark's throat, and another shark has no trouble scarfing down a really big fish.

Not all the nature shows are so traumatic. ``In the Company of Whales,'' narrated by the late Jessica Tandy, was one of the loveliest films ever to appear on the channel. In a clip, a marine biologist declares that hearing the song of the humpbacks firsthand was, for him, ``more wonderful than anything I know that's ever happened to me in my life.''

In Africa, poachers have made elephants an endangered species as they hunt them for ivory. In ``The Ivory Wars,'' narrator James Earl Jones warned that the elephant may soon exist only as ``trinkets, chopsticks and piano keys'' and said, with Jones' usual unimpeachable authority, ``If they vanish, we shall miss them when they're gone.''

You'll also see: meerkats in the Kalahari Desert scamper, peek and peep about as they go through their daily routines; a chimpanzee in the rain forest who ``died of grief'' after its mother was killed in a mishap; a mama Alaskan bear trying to shepherd her cubs across a stream in the search for food; a husband-wife team of naturalists daring to scratch the butt of a hippopotamus as it lollygags underwater; and a merciless crocodile clamping its jaws around the snout of a stranded zebra and dragging it to its death.

The program includes excerpts from other acclaimed documentaries like the lengthy Watergate recap on which John Dean, John Ehrlichman and the late H.R. Haldeman all appeared; a memorably wrenching film about a pair of Siamese twin girls born to an Irish couple; and probably the best documentary anybody did on the 50th anniversary of D-Day, ``Normandy, The Great Crusade,'' winner of a Peabody Award.

Discovery Communications Inc., has big plans for the future, including a chain of Discovery Channel stores, feature films to premiere in theaters, and something called ``Your Choice TV'' for the interactive video revolution to come. As long as it keeps supplying us with amazing sights, with sharks and meerkats and chimpanzees, Discovery will remain a channel not just to watch but to cherish.

Tom Shales is TV editor and chief TV critic for The Washington Post.

by CNB