SERIES WATCH

Changi

Pearl, 11.50pm

Professor Bill Dwyer (Terry Norris) is a lecturer in mathematics, much loved by his students. On his final day he presents his farewell speech to a packed auditorium, following which he is visited by a young student Joanne (Katherine Slattery). She bears a remarkable resemblance to the girl he fell in love with before joining the army.

Joanne believes Bill to be a friend of her grandmother and brings out a photo of her as a young girl, standing with a handsome young man in army uniform. Bill is immediately drawn back to the day the photo was taken: his final day before leaving for the war . . . and the day he proposed to the beautiful Betty O'Neill.

He shows Joanne a drawing he has kept for nearly 60 years - a sketch done by Tom of Bill, Curley, Gordon, David and Eddie in their prison barracks - and begins to tell her of his lost years as a prisoner of war.

In Changi, a young Bill (Leon Ford, above with Slattery) eagerly takes the opportunity to attend 'classes' held by some of the other POWs. He meets Doctor Hurrell, an English academic imprisoned when Singapore fell, who cultivates in Bill a love of numbers and mathematics that is to stay with him all his life.

Lieutenant Aso forces Tom to sketch the camp commander Nakamura, in preparation for a visit to the camp by General Tanaka of the Japanese Imperial Army. Bill and his friends, 'the secret nine', decide to make the proceedings more interesting by doctoring the sketch.

La Femme Nikita

Pearl, 10.30pm

Almost a year after Michael deprogrammed Nikita (Peta Wilson, above) from the Gelman mind-control process, she begins to suffer sudden, painful after-effects. This interferes with her efforts to capture The Collective's top bio-weapons expert. O'Brien helps her, but he and Walter know Operations is waiting for the opportunity to eliminate Nikita. They help her search for a cure.

Unfortunately, the cure requires extracting a tissue sample from the original Gelman test subject, Adrian, the founder of Section One. Only Michael knows Adrian's whereabouts. Can they find him in time to save Nikita?

Instinct

Star Movies, 7pm

Within the brilliant mind of primatologist Ethan Powell (Anthony Hopkins, right) lies an ominous secret. Highly educated and sophisticated, Powell's behaviour was derived from years of studying mountain gorillas - to the point where he was living among them in the wild and accepted as one of their own.

Now held captive in a brutal prison for the criminally insane, Powell, who has not spoken for years, and is accused of killing some park rangers, is remanded to psychiatrist Theo Caulder (Cuba Gooding Jnr, left).

Caulder's unbridled ambition drives him to risk everything and put his life on the line in order to understand the actions of this headline-gripping madman. Eventually, both men embark on an extraordinary journey fuelled by their insatiable hunger for the truth, regardless of the cost. Also starring Donald Sutherland and Maura Tierney. (1999)