Passage to eternity
THERE is a new series on World about death and the way people around the globe deal with it. In the first episode of Death - The Trip Of A Lifetime (8.30pm) we visit Valley Green in Washington DC, where it is proven to be more dangerous to walk to work in the morning than it is to go bungee jumping, skydiving, or even eat Hong Kong seafood.
Death could have been a sensational programme, and indeed it does have its moments of gratuitous gore; a corpulent cadaver on a hospital slab and a film of a Japanese gentleman falling from a tall building in Canada when the rope he is hanging on to snaps.
But kicking the bucket, buying a farm, call it what you want, gets the respect it deserves for most of the time. This is, after all, not a television series about how unpleasant dying can be, but about how we all have to do it one day, along with filling out tax returns, and there is no point carping.
As Kingsley Amis said, death does have something to be said for it. There is no need to get out of bed for it.
This evening's programme, called Chasm, also features footage of a festival of the dead in Mexico and of a Purepechan Indian ritual never photographed before. Such rituals, is the conclusion, are designed not so much to comfort those who have gone before (because they are dead and probably don't need comforting) but to ease our own passage. A kind of balm before the embalming.
JON Amiel will be known to the British as the man who directed for television The Singing Detective, playwright Dennis Potter's award-winning but controversial play.
Amiel has also dabbled on the big screen, notably with Queen Of Hearts (Pearl, 12 midnight), a jewel of a film about love and revenge, seen through the imaginative eyes of a child.
Now grown, Eddie (Ian Hawkes), narrates the flashback story of his close-knit Italian family, who emigrate to England after World War II when his father and mother elope to escape the attentions of a wealthy suitor.
On the advice of a talking pig, the father (Joseph Long), makes enough money gambling to become the proprietor of a London restaurant, the Lucky Cafe.
It is then that things go wrong. The wealthy suitor, who has also emigrated, and who has made a bigger fortune from owning gambling houses, wins everything the father owns in a card game. The stage is set for the Sting-like scam the family works to get even with him.
Amiel handpicked the cast for this film from what he referred to as a ''treasure trove of unknowns''. There are a few standard Italian immigrant cliches along the way, but Queen Of Hearts is never patronising. Instead it is warm, moving and often very funny.
AUSTRALIAN director Peter Weir tried to add some international flavour to his American portfolio (Witness, Dead Poet's Society) by casting that professional Frenchman Gerard Depardieu opposite Andie MacDowell in Green Card (Pearl, 9.30pm).
Depardieu plays George Faure, a French alien who wants to stay in the US. MacDowell plays Bronte Parrish, a quiet horticulturist who desperately wants to rent a big Manhattan apartment complete with greenhouse.
Problem is, the building management will only rent to married couples. So Faure and Parrish meet (through mutual friends) and strike a deal to get married so she can get her apartment and he can get his green card. After a quick, legal ceremony, they go their separate ways - until immigration officers start snooping around.
What follows is a series of coincidences and unmotivated behaviour, punctuated by insipid dialogue, that will leave you exasperated when it does not leave you rather bored.
The film's redeeming factor is Depardieu's lively and eccentric performance.
THE British made-for-cable film Hostages (World, 9.30pm) is a gritty but otherwise decidedly average dramatisation of the Western hostages held in Lebanon during the 1980s - John McCarthy, Terry Waite, Brian Keenan, Tom Sutherland, Frank Reed and Terry Anderson. Natasha Richardson, Kathy Bates and Colin Firth star.
