Documentaries and Canada just go together.

At least that's why publicists say Canadian viewers will support the upcoming Documentary Channel set to air later this Fall.

"Canada has had a long tradition of documentaries. The first documentary was made here," says Michael Harris, a manager for the channel. "So not only do I think it will survive, I think it will do very, very well."

The Canadian documentary tradition started with Canadian film-maker Robert J. Flaherty, who released Nanook of the North in 1922. Ever since, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Film Board have created hundreds of stellar, Canadian-made documentaries that feature every aspect of human life, Harris says.

The problem is that few Canadians ever get to see those productions. Even though the CBC has broadcast as many documentaries as it could over the years, it does not have enough air time to show all the films being produced.

"Every year I go to an Academy Award party and many people say, `Well, where can you find these?'" Harris said.

The answer to that question brought about the idea for a national documentary channel. Both the CBC and NFB decided that they wanted an outlet for Canada's award-winning films, which meant both organizations could dust off some of the documentaries languishing in their archival basements.

Publicists say the channel will run a program called MasterWorks, during which it will air many of those films. That program will show Academy Award-winning documentaries such as The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Wisdom of the Algonquin Round Table and From Mao to Mozart; Isaac Stern in China. The channel will also air a weekly segment called Director's Cut, during which it will broadcast films that won other awards.

Some of the remaining time slots will be filled with newsy pieces that hit hard and look at crime, politics and scandal with journalistic skepticism. One show, Eyewitness, will run as a weekly current affairs program that shows the best of television journalism from around the world, and which will try to provide analysis of major political and socioeconomic events.

Other time-slots will be filled with various softer pieces - life stories, biographies and features on cultural trends. Sports and entertainment pieces are also slated to make regular appearances on air.

The channel will be a diverse mixture of genres that publicists say will reveal the many ways in which documentaries can maximize the story-telling medium of film, by capturing life in all its emotional, psychological, factual, and spiritual aspects.

For example, each weekend a program called Festival will offer viewers a movie on an event or issue, such as the raid on Dieppe, and then run a documentary on the same topic right afterward. The aim is to give viewers both artistic and realistic impressions of the event, and a fuller understanding of its factual context.

A different weekly program will show long-term series documenting personal lives over years and even decades. One award-winning series that is set to launch with the channel in the Fall documents the lives of a group of girls and boys as they mature from youth to middle age, along seven year intervals. The first show in the series is called Seven Up and the last is titled 42 Up.

Other programming will include shows that look behind the scenes of documentary making itself. A show called In Camera, hosted by Christina Pochmursky, will include interviews with directors and sources, who may like or dislike their portrayal in a documentary.

The channel also has adult programming set aside for its midnight slots in a program called Exposure. That series of shows will "reveal the steamier side of life," the publicist said.

But apart from dusting off the archives and showing good film work that already exists, the channel's managers also say they plan to fertilize the soil of creative film-making by broadcasting young and emerging talent, too.

Harris said part of the channel's exploratory twist will be to broadcast films by university film and journalism students, as well as some high school productions. That program should be under way before the end of the year, he said.

He also said the channel will commission new documentaries to help make some of that amateur talent professional, keeping alive the tradition that Flaherty started eight decades ago with Nanook.