Edutainment is a combination of two English words, education and entertainment. It refers to modern forms of education combined with entertainment, using multimedia tools and devices.
This term can be used to describe the British television series Operation Ouch!, whose first season, titled Operácia au!, is being broadcast by RTVS in January with Slovak dubbing.
It is a family format, so the broadcast time offers parents and their children an ideal opportunity to spend 30 minutes together in front of the screen, not only to be entertained, but also to learn useful, interesting, sometimes surprising, even shocking health information in a non-violent way. One could even say that when it comes to the human body, nothing is taboo in the series.
The brothers who appear in it are identical twins, Christopher and Alexander van Tulleken, who earned their medical degrees from Oxford University in 2002. In the series they call themselves Chris and Xand. On screen they are open, entertaining, and can joke about themselves, but most of all they bring insight into the human body, especially emergency medicine. In each episode, a real case of a child injury or illness is mapped out, and viewers get to get a glimpse into various hospital departments, for example, surgery for eye strabismus, or tonsillectomy. Chris and Xand do not hesitate to perform experiments on their own bodies in the lab so that viewers can see how various parts of the body and organs work. And concrete instructions on how to treat different injuries are also useful for adults, not only for child viewers.
The series presents medicine and science to children and their parents with ease, perspective, and humor, while at the same time realistically and without embellishment.
RTVS broadcasts the first episode of season 1 on Saturday, 11.1.2020 on Jednotka in the late morning.