Never has a woman heaved her bosom to such shattering effect as Raquel Welch in 1966's One Million Years BC (World, 9.30 pm). The fur bikini-clad prehistoric creature could have launched a thousand ships during the past 20 years and hidden them all in that welcoming cleavage. It strikes me that Welch is the ultimate dream woman - about whom every man has fantasised - and the only one, indeed, whom my faithful father has admitted he would leave my mother for. Welch has never achieved much in the way of acting recognition, but her high-cheekboned beauty has kept her a firm favourite in men's eyes. An icon more than an actress, she has, on more than one occasion - most notably in last week's The Three Musketeers - parodied herself to great effect. One Million Years BC, a Hammer remake of the 1940 Hal Roach movie starring Victor Mature and Carol Landis, was the film that pushed her to stardom and on to the walls of every mechanics' garage in the cinema-going world in that most famous of cave girl posters. Of course, the dinosaurs are primitive by Jurassic Park standards, but the Ray Harryhausen creatures are still highly watchable. There is so little to the plot you could write it on Welch's bikini and still have space for a short story, but this is one of those good for being bad kind of movies so it doesn't really matter. Tamak, one of the Rock people, has been expelled from his tribe and rescued from certain death by Loana, of the Shell people, a gentle, advanced tribe who live by the sea. Their love causes a rift between the two tribes, but, amid erupting volcanoes, all strife is settled as the survivors band together to face the fight for survival in a new, changed landscape. Romeo And Juliet meets The Flintstones. I can remember sitting on the floor of a friend's rather shabby Tin Hau apartment watching The X Files (Pearl, 8.30 pm) for the first time. It struck me that all such strange goings on could be happening in the 10 storeys above me and the 17 below and it was thrilling. This, I thought, is a show for which I shall feign excuses and turn down evenings out to watch. This is a show with sharp scripts, wonderfully incredulous but entertaining plots, colourful and charismatic leads and worthy special effects. This is a show that will run and run. And, of course, it is. But I have to say, while I still find it mildly entertaining, it tends on occasion to be so utterly ridiculous that I find myself laughing rather than being entranced. And David Duchovny, overawed by his instant stardom, seems as alien as many of the characters he seeks out, a parody of his own persona. Tonight's episode is a warning to anyone who has ever arranged a date over the Internet when a killer with a fat - rather than a weight problem - strikes. When the Panama Canal was carved from the tangled forests of the isthmus of Panama, Barro Colorado Island was set aside and later made a reserve. In 1946 it was placed under the stewardship of the Smithsonian Tropical Institute, the oldest long-term research facility in the tropics. In National Geographic (World, 8.31 pm), scientists and researchers from all over the world travel to the island to try to make sense of some of the dizzying complexity of life in the tropical rain-forest. Looking at the web of life surrounding one of the most prominent denizens of the community, the giant, centuries old, fruit-bearing almendro tree, biologists are unravelling its complex relationship with other forest dwellers such as red-tailed squirrels, Capuchin monkeys, leaf-cutter ants and agoutis.
