Alien attacks

The Entity (World, 9.30pm), the story of a woman invaded by an unknown alien force, is supposed to be scary not just because of the usual special effects, but because it is based on a true story. Carla Moran, played in the movie by Barbara Hershey, was a real woman, who had a hard life raising her three children alone.

Then she began to be attacked by a force she could not hear or see, and the doctors who at first wrote her off as a nutter, decided there might be something in it after all. Unfortunately, despite Hershey's usual imaginative performance, this ends up as the usual cheap-thrills chiller.

In some ways, the second part of the series Future Fantastic (BBC, 10pm) is much scarier than the first, since it includes footage of existing robots that are far stronger, more clever and longer-lasting than any human.

There are some intelligent, indestructible machines the world needs, such as a remarkable toilet-cleaning device called the Scrubmate. And there are some the world arguably does not.

One merry egghead predicts that one day robots will be the soldiers and farmers of the future. Another suggests that because robots will be smarter than us, they may also be nicer, because things such as war and poverty are so obviously illogical.

Silliest of all is an American professor introduced by presenter Gillian Anderson as the 'self-described bad boy of robotics', although we never really find out why he calls himself this. His mission, he says, came to him when he invited a bunch of students over to celebrate the non-birthday of HAL, the super computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was supposed to have been born in 1992.