Dire duo's return

BREAK out the Bolli, the slags are back. While the third series of Absolutely Fabulous (Pearl, 6.50pm) is not a patch on the first, it is still a bit of a riot, with Edna and Patsy as seductively ghastly as ever, lolling around in the back of taxi cabs, guzzling champers, falling about in gutters and men's laps.

As the programme progressed from wayward cult to obligatory mainstream, the challenge for Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley was always going to be to keep the energy going without simply recycling all the silver-tracksuit, sweetie-darling jokes. Are the Ab Fab team in danger of making a parody of parody? Perhaps, but as Joanna Lumley commented in a recent interview: 'I'll tell you what the show isn't,' she said. 'It's not boring.' Certainly not. This series sees the dire duo jetting off to New York, bungling their way through a PR awards night, hiring a couple of male prostitutes and coping with Patsy's sister (who is even more hideous than Pats) before arriving at a final parting of the ways. The result is mayhem; a never-ending journey for the Sisters Grimm towards self-fulfilment. And the joke is, they never get there - which is why they remain so adorable.

In an age when political correctness is the order of the day, the show and its cast of neurotic, self-obsessed, egotistical characters fires rockets at every imaginable taboo. This is the series that contains a joke about pap smears, with Pats turning to that wonderful teenager Saffron for an explanation of the term cervix.

The rest of the Ab Fab regulars feature; it would have been half as good without them. Crafty June Whitfield pinches many of the best one-liners playing Edina's increasingly dotty mother. And who could forget Bubbles, the office secretary who is one drawer short of a filing cabinet? WHAT a fine title Shark Shocker (World, 6.30pm) is for a programme. Nice bit of alliteration. The subject matter is obvious. The programme contains footage of Ron and Valerie Taylor, shark geeks extraordinaire, swimming at the Durban Oceanographic Research Institute with an unpredictable Zambesi shark known for its severe mood swings.

DIRECTOR Wim Wenders has announced his attention to release a five-hour version of Until The End Of The World (World, 9.30pm) on video. He intended this film as the ultimate road movie. It has a plot to match; as a rogue nuclear satellite threatens to explode, a woman tracks a man with multiple identities across Europe, to Japan, China and Australia, where she meets his blind mother and his father, who has invented a camera enabling the blind to see. The result is a dream partly realised, and still partly in the head of the director.

There are no such complexities in Kickboxer (Pearl, 9.30pm), a dumb, sadistic martial arts adventure with Jean-Claude Van Damme.