There is something almost unbearably tactless about TVB's decision to screen Glengarry Glen Ross (Pearl, 9.30pm) at this time, when Hong Kong's property market is on its knees.
It is all too easy to imagine that there is an office somewhere in Hong Kong not unlike the one portrayed in the film, filled with anxious, callous and desperate salesmen who must make just one more sale to keep their jobs.
Playwright David Mamet wrote the original play in the 1980s, when it acted as a kind of angry challenge to the boomtime Greed is Good environment. The film was not made until 1992, by which time the American economy had been through a nasty decline and the tone was more sadness than rage.
Jack Lemmon plays the central, most pathetic figure, Shelley Levene, a fifty-something salesman who at the end of a career of cold-calling and persuading people to buy property they do not really need or want, is suddenly afraid.
He is afraid because his daughter needs expensive treatment, and he seems to have lost his knack for selling.
And there is a new boss in town, played with foul-mouthed passion by Alec Baldwin, who has decided to set a competition for the sales team.
First prize, a Cadillac, second prize, steak knives. And third prize . . . the sack.