THERE'S one good thing to be said for all these Airport movies, at least they kept old George Kennedy gainfully employed. He pops up in just about all of them, so it's poetic justice that he later found greater fame sending up this sort of movie in The Naked Gun films.
Airport 1975 (World 9.30pm, Original Running Time 106 mins) is just about worth watching for the laughs. This is the one that provided most of the material for the Airplane spoofs and boy does it deserve being ridiculed.
It boasts the obligatory Mega-Name cast - many of them well past their sell-by date - as a variety of cardboard characters. Charlton Heston, Gloria Swanson, Myrna Loy and Dana Andrews have all been roped in, and somehow Helen Reddy is cast as a singing nun, while Linda Blair's the ubiquitous lass awaiting a life-saving operation.
Dana Andrews plays a private pilot whose plane crashes into a 747 wiping out its flight crew and leaving a rather nasty hole. It's up to our heroine Karen Black to fly the plane, until boyfriend Heston (whose on the ground) thinks of a better idea.
According to the film-makers' blurb: ''The rescue attempt . . . brings Airport 1975 to a heart-battering peak of excitement and suspense''. Doesn't sound like the Airport 1975 this viewer sat through.
HAVEN'T seen Hi Honey, I'm Dead (Pearl 9.30pm, ORT 100 mins) and the name does little to inspire, but the synopsis describes it as a made-for-TV fantasy-comedy starring Curtis Armstrong (the little guy from the TV series Moonlighting ).