“The Century” Tonight at 9 on Ch.7

The professorial narration by Peter Jennings and the traditional storytelling format conspire to make both hours seem drab

“THE Century” gets off to a slow but steady start.The first of six two-hour installments that will air over the next two weeks on the network is a straightforward, no-nonsense look back at two heroic turning points in a century in which mankind literally broke free of Earth’s gravity.

Charles Lindbergh’s lonely first transAtlantic flight and the massive group effort to win the race to the moon and beyond did much to change the way we looked at ourselves and our world.

The professorial narration by flagship anchor Peter Jennings and the traditional storytelling format conspire to make both hours seem drab to generations raised on “The Spirit of St. Louis,” “The Right Stuff” and “From the Earth to the Moon.”

“The Century” is comprehensive, no doubt. Encyclopedic, even.

But it has the air of an Ivory Tower standing incongruously at the end of a century in which the man and woman on the street participated in history as it was being made to an extent never possible before the flowering of the mass media and instant communication.

This is a decade in which we are used to seeing even war news as it is made, in which scandal mongers never sleep, biographers work with Polaroid speed, instant history is packaged and repackaged time and again in the same news cycles, and even the remotest villages can take an immediate byte out of the informational pie.

Perhaps the very process of spending some eight years sifting through more than 3,000 hours of historical footage and interviewing more than 500 witnesses to pivotal events so overwhelmed those who toiled on “The Century” that they could not possibly have seen a new forest for bumping into the same old trees.

And so we feel less that we are there than that we should be taking notes, in case there’s a pop test at the beginning of Thursday’s installment, which will trace Hitler’s rise to power and the race to develop the atomic bomb.

Not that tonight is without moments that even less-than-dutiful history buffs can appreciate. Lindbergh’s goal was not to be famous. He came by his aloofness honestly.

When his mother and he refused to hug before his historic trip began, the press created the desired picture by simply pasting their heads on more compliant bodies.

The age of celebrity had begun.