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SCMP Reporter

YOU should pass Death Hunt (World, 9.35pm) and Police Story: Cop Killer (Pearl, 9.30pm) and proceed straight to Picket Fences or Cracker (see below).

  Death Hunt, which stars Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin, is an Arctic cross between Straw Dogs and Death Wish, but not as good as either.

  Angie Dickinson is wasted as a woman who is there to provide the love interest and nothing else.

  The title of Police Story: Cop Killer tells you more about it than a synopsis ever could.

  It features a cop (Ken Olin) hunting a killer of cops. The blanks you can fill in for yourselves.

     THE impressive thing about Chicago Hope (World, 8.35pm), apart from the fact that so much can be going on in any one hospital in any one day, is the way the technicalities come rushing at you with conviction.

  The stories are a mixture of microcosm and mish-mash - medical ethics, doctors playing God, nurses getting emotionally involved - but the nuts and bolts are accurate.

  Scriptwriter David Kelly gets a team of medical consultants to check every script, and admits that they give him a hard time. 'The seemingly insignificant details are the important ones, such as where a nurse would stand during an operation, or how instruments would be laid out on surgical trays.'      THE American situation comedy Married with Children (Pearl, 6.50pm) was recently voted one of the worst on television, and judging from other American situation comedies the competition for that crown must be stiff. It has been running in Hong Kong for a number of years, presumably because it is cheap. This evening's episode, called Eatin' Out, features a modest inheritance, an elegant restaurant and a joke - it's a long time coming, but worth the wait - involving a shoe.

  Picket Fences (Pearl, 12 midnight) has also been getting a good run for its money, but it does have things going for it, notably some endearingly eccentric performances from the leads, Tom Skerritt and Kathy Baker. It also has stories, offbeat ones, but stories at least.

  In Survival of the Fittest, Zachary Brock (Adam Wylie) files suit against the Rome School Committee for teaching creationism.

     THERE is the danger of sounding like an old record when I say the best programmes are shown at the worst times. But the best programmes are shown at the worst times. Cracker (Pearl, 12.50am) is another that suffers from the programmers' belief that we have all got better things to do than go to bed.

  This is the second part of a story called One Day A Lemming Will Fly. Police criminologist Fitz (Robbie Coltrane) finds himself torn between the desire for justice and the desire for a good holiday with D.S. Penhaligon (Geraldine Somerville).

     THE whodunnit Kissing The Gunner's Daughter (STAR Plus, 9.00pm) is another in STAR's series of Ruth Rendell mysteries and stars George Baker and Christopher Ravenscroft. Baker is the English bumpkin detective Wexford, Inspector Morse minus the Mahler, who suddenly finds himself up to his ears in corpses, a police officer's among them.

  Like all whodunnits worth their salt, this features an eccentric novelist and a massacre at a country house.

  The penultimate part of A Fortunate Life (2am) continues the story of Bert Facey (Bill Hunter) who in episode one was an eight-year-old being forced to work as a farm labourer and is now a veteran of the slaughter at Gallipoli and on the verge of marriage. Third and final part tomorrow, same time.

     FILMS on Cable Movie Channel:   Sharky's Machine (7.00pm). Extremely violent action-packed film on the lines of Dirty Harry with set-piece stunts and a disconcerting mainstream jazz score.

  Burt Reynolds is a vice-cop with a vendetta against an underworld honcho (Vittorio Gassman). Rachel Ward also stars.

  Weekend At Bernie's (3am). Puerile but harmlessly enjoyable comedy about two no-hopers who wangle an invitation to their boss's weekend home, only to find him dead when they arrive.



Run away from death