More than a decade after Britain's miners lost their famous battle to save pits and jobs, Mark Herman made Brassed Off (Pearl, 9.35pm) about their plight. By 1992, when this film was set, the industry was close to the dinosaur stage, and so were its men. Brassed Off will be most enjoyed by Hong Kong's remaining socialists and those who appreciate North Yorkshire culture, being essentially about the desecration of the working class, their jobs and communities by capitalism and nuclear power. While The Full Monty told a similar story through unemployed steel workers resorting to a striptease act to earn a crust and purpose in life, this one does so through a brass band and one man's passion to keep it alive amid community-wide and personal catastrophe. Band members who play under the single-minded Danny (Pete Postlethwaite) include Trainspotting's Ewan McGregor, as Andy. But it is the older, more complex character of Danny who holds centre stage. Brassed Off shared honours in several film festivals with The Full Monty. But despite the band's uplifting music it could not match the male strippers in catching the imagination of a mass international audience. It is, though, the sort of film that should be appreciated in Pearl's International Film Week. Two years after the handover and the media blitz that accompanied it, the handover story is back. We are now in the count-down phase to the final departure of European administration over Chinese soil, with Macau's return to the motherland now just over two months away. Hong Kong television is already marking the occasion. The Pearl Report (Pearl, 8pm) prepares us with a four-part series beginning tonight, similar to the historical series it produced before Hong Kong's colonial rulers departed. Macau: Back To The Motherland begins with the story of how the enclave came under Portuguese influence about 450 years ago. Portugal was the first European power to arrive in the region and, despite its more recent poverty, the last to go. Executive producer and presenter Diana Lin went to Portugal to interview ex-governors and prime ministers serving in crucial periods in the past few decades. But for this week, she met the fifth-generation descendants of Macau's first governor, Joao Amarala, who assumed office in the wake of the First Opium War, when Portugal formalised its rule. She also interviewed historians, most notably Father Manuel Teixeira, the Jesuit priest who made Macau his home back in 1925. China, of course, feels deeply humiliated by foreign political control over its territory. On December 20 we can expect it to celebrate the end of that chapter as much as the return of Macau. The series will look at friction between colonialists and locals. But in this episode we are reminded there was no humiliating conquest by Portugal. In fact the story goes that there was tacit goodwill between the Ming emperors and the Portuguese. Not only were the Europeans welcomed for subduing marauding pirates but this programme recalls how they delivered an Indonesian herb to a childless emperor which solved his problem.
