Academy's final bust
IT is difficult to know which is more of an ordeal; the World Cup or the fact that Pearl is showing all the Police Academy films. There are three weeks to go for one, but the other comes to an end this evening with Police Academy 6: City Under Seige (Pearl, 9.30pm).
This is more of the same, but not as funny. And Police Academy was never really funny to start with. Bubba Smith returns as Hightower, Michael Winslow as Jones, David Graf as Tackleberry and Marion Ramsay as Hooks. Steve Guttenberg wisely decided to pass, having realised by this stage that there are only so many laughs a screenwriter can wring from flatulence.
The plot, for what it is worth, involves a treacherous gang known as the Wilson Heights Gang. They unleash the worst outbreak of crime the city has known. And, horror of horrors, the property market is threatened.
Meanwhile, the eternally uptight and painfully inept Lieutenant Harris (G.W. Bailey) believes there is a spy loose in the precinct. The rest you can guess.
YOU would be better spending your time watching the desert shift, which is what David Hughes did when he lived for a year in Africa's Namib desert, the oldest desert on Earth.
Man's Heritage (Pearl, 8.30pm) tells his story and that of the strange animals who make the desert dunes their home. Many deserts have dunes, but only in the Namib's constantly-shifting sands have animals evolved that can live in them.
MARIEL Hemingway, she of the courtroom drama series Civil Wars, stars in Desperate Rescue: The Cathy Mahone Story (Pearl, 12.15am), which is based on a true story. Cathy Mahone's seven-year-old daughter was abducted by her ex-husband, the girl's father, during a routine weekend visitation.
He took the girl back to his home in Jordan, where a mother has no rights over a child who has reached the age of seven.
Mahone tried to get the girl back, and during her struggle came into contact with a group of professional anti-terrorists - former members of the US Government's Delta Force.
IN the first part of the BBC drama Seconds Out (World, 8.30pm), boxer Murray Ritchie (Steven Waddington) was framed for rape. In the second part he finds himself in an unofficial bout facing the man who framed him, a psychotic individual called Ronnie Black (Clive Russell). Tom Bell plays Ritchie's trainer.
EVEN on a rest day there is no escape. Soccer addicts can avoid cold turkey by watching the highlights of the highlights. Andrew Sams introduces World Cup Daily Highlights (World, 7.05pm) while on Pearl there is World Cup '94 Highlights (7.00am) and a brief five-minute update at 6.55pm.
In fact sport dominates on World channel. Wimbledon '94 (9.40pm) features the women's semi-finals, weather permitting.
YOU may remember Chaos Theory from Jurassic Park. It says that if television channels show enough sports coverage in any given month of any given year, revolution will follow. It is the subject of this evening's episode of Capital City (STAR Plus, 9.30pm), the London yuppie drama about merchant bankers (in the real sense of the term, not the Cockney rhyming slang sense).
THE movie Speed is about to open in Hong Kong, which is as good an excuse as any to show The Making Of Speed (Pearl, 11.15pm).
In it, Keanu Reeves plays a bomb disposal expert who has to diffuse a bomb on a bus. His job gets complicated because the perpetrators have rigged the bomb to go off if the bus, driven by a feisty Sandra Bullock, drops below a speed of 80 kilometres per hour. Dennis Hopper also stars and there is a sub-plot about an elevator.
