Nonsensical fun

THE second Beatles film, Help! (World, 9.30pm), was shot on Salisbury Plain, in Austria and the Bahamas. The Beatles chose the Bahamas because they had never been there. The result is a great deal of nonsensical fun, silly at its worst and brilliant at its best.

Help! is really nothing more than an exhausting attempt to outdo A Hard Day's Night in lunatic frenzy. It was once again directed by Richard Lester and once again The Fab Four make a reasonable attempt at being modern-day Marx Brothers. It looks good, sounds good and usually it is good - although in the end becomes a little too frenetic to be truly memorable.

The story, as if it matters, revolves around the crazed efforts of a pair of Eastern religious zealots (Leo McKern and the ravishing, underrated Eleanor Bron) to get hold of a sacred ring that has been given to Ringo by a fan and which is stuck on his finger.

Ringo approaches a scientist for help, but the scientist and his assistant (Roy Kinnear) have heard about the ring's magical properties and join the madcap scramble to get their hands on it.

CHUCK NORRIS opted for an unwise change of pace in Hero and the Terror (Pearl, 9.30pm), playing a 'sensitive' cop as opposed to his usual highly insensitive Rambo-type. Steve James makes a believable villain. 'Nothing this evil dies easily,' said the advertising.

IN Black and Blue (World, 12.40am) an undercover black constable (Christopher John Hall) discovers a world of drug-dealing, vicious racism and savage violence - and that's just in the police force.

His job is to find out why a black politician who possessed damaging evidence of police corruption has been found dead. The police are the obvious culprits, but too many people don't want the investigation to succeed, from the drug dealers on the local rundown estates to the bent bobbies who supply them.