A race winner by two heads
AFTER the excitement of the $4.5 million International Cup and the $3.5 million International Bowl races at Sha Tin on Sunday, tonight's race meeting at Happy Valley is going to seem a bit ordinary.
However, spending a Racing Night Live (World, 9pm) in the company of Robin Parke and the SCMP 's Lawrence Wadey - apparently, affectionately known at the Jockey Club as Dobbin and Florence - is still the most entertaining programme on offer at prime time.
COME back Rambo all is forgiven. If the title alone is not enough to put you off Death Before Dishonour (Pearl, 9.45pm, Original Running Time 95 mins), then Fred Dryer's macho posturings should.
He plays Marine Sergeant Joseph Burns, a real man who keeps a picture of John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima on his wall, and who's so butch he thinks nothing of attempting to gun down rebels on the crowded streets in the Middle East.
The rebels have staged a massacre and kidnapped two of Burns' superior officers - and that's made him really, really mad. Looks like a man's gonna hafta do what a man's gonna hafta do . . . zzzzzz.
HAVING survived desert and drought in Pole to Pole (Pearl, 8.30pm) last week, Michael Palin and his Passepartout team are now limping towards the remote border crossing of Gallabat into Ethiopia.
There they must run the gauntlet of the armed remnants of fallen dictator Haile Mengistu's defeated but trigger-happy army.
The gloom only lifts when Michael reaches Kenya and is enthusiastically welcomed back to the town of Lerata where he shot scenes for his film The Missionary in 1982.
When he passes Mount Kenya, which straddles the Equator, Michael's completed half his journey. But time is running out and the team are alarmingly late for the only ship that's going to the South Pole.
ED Vulliamy is the journalist who broke the shocking story of the Serb detention camps last year.
In an episode of the compelling documentary series Everyman (BBC, 10.15pm) entitled ''Bosnia's Last Testament'' he returns to the Bosnian town of Travnik tents. There he asks whether the Bosnian way of life is about to be wiped from the face of the Earthby the Serbs.
NIGHT owls should tune into The New Statesman (STAR Plus, 12.40am) to see MP and slimeball Alan B'Stard (Rick Mayall) heading off to California.
The conniving B'stard leaps into the round of Hollywood parties, and is soon chatting up starlet Donna Nightingale with the aim of proving to her why he's got the biggest majority in the House of Commons.
LIVE coverage continues of the preliminary rounds of the World Cup soccer tournament (Prime Sports, 2am).
Tonight's World Cup qualifier is between Denmark and Latvia.
