Helping to heighten awareness
TODAY is World AIDS Day, a fact which seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the terrestrial channels. STAR however is continuing its awareness campaign, and bringing it right home to Hong Kong with the MTV News Asian Youth Forum on AIDS Awareness (8pm).
The forum took place in Hong Kong Park and was attended by around 70 young people of various nationalities, as well as a panel of experts including World Health Organisation's Dr Rabin Sarda, Hong Kong Health Secretary Elizabeth Wong and Mike Sinclair ofAIDS Concern.
The youngsters make lively participants, criticising the lack of AIDS education in schools here, and asking pertinent questions like ''does using a condom add up to safe sex, or just safer sex?'' and ''what are the chances of getting HIV through oral sex?'' They also suggest that it would be easier, and less embarrassing to buy condoms if they were available for both sexes through vending machines. Full marks to MTV, it's this age group that should be talking about AIDS, which is now the number one killer of men between 25 and 44 in the US.
CLINT Eastwood makes his second outing as Dirty Harry Callaghan in tonight's rerun of a rerun Magnum Force (Pearl 9.30pm, Original Running Time 124 mins) which manages to be neither as disturbing nor as imaginative as the original movie.
Here, Harry's after some rookie cops who (horrors) are imitating his earlier vigilante antics. The message that comes across is it's okay for Harry to take the law into his own hands, but not anyone else - seems fair.
Scripted by John Milius and Michael Cimino, there are some good action sequences, just no surprises.
IN June, 12 construction workers were killed when the lift at their Quarry Bay building site plunged 17 floors. As a result, the Labour Department tightened safety regulations and stipulated that regular checks on heavy machinery should be made by registered professional engineers.
Given that there are few people with such qualifications here, The Hong Kong Connection (Pearl 7pm) questions whether the amendments are being adhered to, and discovers that on some sites nothing has changed.
WILDLIFE photographers John and Simon King were the acclaimed father and son partnership behind the award-winning Kali the Lion, which was shown in Hong Kong early in the year. Their latest is Dusk the Badger (World 10.30pm), a 55-minute study that was five years in the making.
It's powerful stuff, as the poor old badger fights for survival against various enemies, the most persistent and cruellest of whom is man. There are the ''diggers'', men who block badger holes, then return at night to dig out the entombed animals to use in their ''sport'' of pitting badger against dog. Or badger baiters who capture them in the wild then transport them to towns for further torture.
It's not all doom and gloom, footage of the badger's family life is fascinating, but think twice about letting youngsters stay up to watch.
DOES anyone understand the new Chanel No. 5 ad? It involves one silky-looking woman, with an unidentifiable accent, huskily telling her dinner-suited partner that he hates her and she hates him. In fact she hates him so much she thinks she's going to die from it.
All the while, she has one hand behind her back in which she's clutching a hefty bottle of perfume. Is she going to thwack him over the head with it while he's busy kissing her, or is this some sort of up-market S&M game? I think we should be told.
