IN case you were wondering, The Making of the Three Tenors in Concert (World, 8.30pm) is being shown because this is the first anniversary, near enough, of the concert, which took place in Los Angeles last year before the World Cup Finals and in the presence of luminaries such as Gene Kelly and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The concert itself was a decidedly tacky affair, with the fat men performing a few popular arias and Singin' in the Rain against a backdrop of gushing fountains. Time magazine voted it the most overrated event of 1994.
Yet the behind-the-scenes stuff, which is what this programme is about, is generally fascinating. Getting Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti on to the same stage at the same time is as logistically and financially challenging as putting men on the moon. You might wonder why they bothered, but the act of bothering makes good television.
IT'S juvenile, blindingly obvious and not as good as it should be, but it's still difficult not to like The Naked Gun (World, 9.30pm). The Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker writing team, who had already had a huge hit with Airplane!, based the film - The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! to give it its complete title - on their cult television show Police Squad. The show was not a big hit, but had a loyal following.
Merely recounting the plot, if indeed there is one, of any ZAZ comedy fails to convey the lunacy and occasional charm of the production. Leslie Nielsen is the idiotic police inspector Frank Drebin and Priscilla Presley the personal assistant to a drug dealer called Ludwig. The jokes come so thick and fast you will barely have time to realise how good/bad/old/corny they are.
THE worrying thing about Red Dawn (Pearl, 9.30pm) is that it is so ludicrous it is almost dangerous. It's a throwback to the Cold War era, with small-town teens (Patrick Swayze among them) taking to the hills to fight a guerilla campaign when the Russians invade. The Russians - Reds, Commies, call them what you will - parachute into a Colorado schoolyard. So it is that Red Dawn begins stupidly and goes downhill.