Cracking crime wave

BE thankful for The Green Hornet (World, 9.00pm). Chewing gum for the brain it may be, but it has no pretensions. Television that is unintentionally bad often ends up being rather good, in the tradition of Batman, Superman or The Lone Ranger, all of whom, like the Hornet, had a penchant for tight pants.

Tonight The Green Hornet, his inscrutable sidekick Kato and their super sting stun guns, crack a computer crime wave that has implicated the Hornet as its leader.

It all starts mundanely enough, with a planeload of passengers and crew gassed to death before they can work out how to fit all the components of their in-flight meal on to the seat-back tray and still have enough room left for a cup of cold coffee.

Rubies are stolen from a jeweller on the flight and the perpetrator leaves behind a Green Hornet calling card. Who lands the plane? Elementary, dear Kato, the thief is a retired airline pilot.

The plot thickens when the Green Hornet, in his other guise as mild-mannered newspaper proprietor Britt Reid, receives a curious letter from a scientist who claims to have invented a computer that can predict crimes before they happen.

After a crime at The Sports Arena, a car chase and a showdown at The Customs Warehouse, ''much fighting ensues'', according to the synopsis and the evil scientist - incredible, it was him all the time - is crushed to death under some crates.

There is nothing wrong with giving the game away, because the game is the same every week. More power to the Green Hornet and Kato. It is a shame Bruce Lee didn't live long enough to enjoy this revival as much as we do.

THE moral of the mini-series Bloodlines: Murder in the Family (Pearl, 9.30pm) is not that you shouldn't kill your mother and father, but that you should consider the anxiety it will cause others if you do.

Mimi Rogers (The Rapture) is a pampered wife who loses everything when hubby Elliot Gould is dumped in the slammer for bumping off his parents. Gould's parents are out of the story, after all they are dead. Gould is guilty as sin and deserves everything he gets. But poor old Rogers is left without so much as a Sydney Sheldon novel to read on the beach. She has to sell her furs and jewels to support her family.

Bloodlines is ''set against the backdrop of a sensational true-life murder case'', which seems to me like an obtuse way of saying ''Bloodlines is pure fiction''.

IN the mildly entertaining Interceptor (World, 9.30pm) Air Force captain Christopher Winfield (Andrew Divoff) must fly the new supersonic Stealth fighter jet, but instead crashes it. The story is far-fetched, but not as far-fetched, or as hackneyed as Command in Hell (Star Plus, 8.30pm), in which Suzanne Pleshette is a tough woman cop assigned to a precinct known as The Sewer.

Monsignor Quixote (Star Plus, 12 midnight and 3.30am) is based on the book by Graham Greene and stars Alec Guinness as the quiet Spanish priest and Leo McKern as the local Marxist mayor.

ASIAN stock markets, like Andrew Divoff in Interceptor, are losing altitude. In Asian Wall Street Journal Report (Pearl, 8.30pm) Consuelo Mack and the team wonder if it is time to bail out. And they look at the price of a degree and the increase in gambling in Japan.

EVERYTHING, according to the singer Joe Jackson, gives you cancer. The finger is now pointing at DDT, a chemical used from the 1940s to the 1960s as a pesticide. It was sprayed on crops and used to kill insects in fields, parks, playgrounds and towns across the US.

20/20 (Pearl, 8.55pm) investigates the link between DDT and breast cancer. In 1993 a public study showed that women with the highest DDT residue in their bodies were more likely to suffer breast cancer than women who had not been exposed. The impetus for the study came from a Long Island housewife who had breast cancer, as did 20 of her neighbours. In the 60s her town had been heavily sprayed with DDT.

Love him or loathe him, and most of us love to loathe him, Donald Trump always makes good grist for the scandal mill. In 20/20 Nancy Collins interviews The Donald and wife Marla - once his secret mistress for two years while he was married to Ivana - about their pre-nuptial agreement, Donald's rise, fall and rise, and their baby Tiffany, of whom, as if you care, 20/20 has the first ever television pictures.

The need for that agreement, the details of which Donald and Marla disagree about during the interview, is underlined by Marla's words when The Donald once walked out on her. She told the New York Post: ''I can't take it any more. He's just pathological. He lies, lies and lies.''