Since both Pearl and World are doing it tonight, there is no reason why this column cannot do it too. Today is the day of year-end round-ups, with Hong Kong Review (Pearl, 8.30 pm) and the more imaginatively titled HK 1998 Riding The Storm (World, 9pm). Two lots of nostalgia at exactly the same time, a fitting reminder of the way both sides have gone in for head-to-heads far too often this year. Today and tomorrow TV Eye becomes HK 1998 Watching The Telly, a chance to sit back and remember some of the televisual highlights of the year. It has been a tough year for English-language television. When the economy began to slow down, both TVB and ATV began to think about ways to keep costs down, and both concluded cutting back on the number of films shown every week was a good way to start. This has proved very good news for viewers. TVB began Serial Tuesday, the drama triple bill, right at the end of 1997, and it has continued in various guises since. The only shows that have let the slot down have been the second series of Murder One, Millennium, The Visitor, which was just silly, and Timecop, which was shown up as badly out of its league when followed by ER. ATV will go the whole hog from Friday, but there have been hints all year of the way things were going. As well as screening many cheap not-quite classics from the archives, such as Butterfield 8 and Waterloo Bridge, we got documentaries about sex, royalty and Hong Kong in the Monday night movie slot for a month or so last summer. And before that there was a radical experiment called Fantastic Friday, which borrowed TVB's triple-bill approach and bracketed Mr Bean with a Japanese game show, and the hit kids show, Teletubbies. Unfortunately these imaginative steps did not stop the two channels from continuing to try and outdo one another with big movies. We got The Scarlet Letter lined up against Far And Away in February, Thelma And Louise versus The Fugitive in March not to mention Schindler's List as the alternative to the Oscars. The efforts to beef up a screening of a good movie scaled new heights this year: Schindler's List inspired an essay writing competition. And Leon gave viewers the chance to win an overcoat and a pair of sunglasses. But it wasn't all over-hyped Hollywood rubbish. TVB finally managed to get hold of an English dubbed version of Les Visiteurs, at last, which meant the French comedy went out in prime time. Last year the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA) told TVB the film had not won enough awards to justify lifting the ban on non-English films. Kyzysztof Kieslowski trilogy Trois Coleurs clearly had, however, and Monday nights were transformed by three consecutive screenings on ATV World in April. While ATV has rarely won ratings numbers with blockbusters, it has always beaten TVB hands down with this kind of programming. TVB takes the low road, and ATV the high. With movies high or low-brow getting bumped to a late-night slot on ATV World, where are we going to see the masterpieces of a European genius in prime time now?
