No Clive But Some Good Murders And Plenty Of Loonies Including Adolf And Uncle Joe

Sydney Morning Herald

Thursday February 1, 2001

Doug Anderson

City Cabs

7.30pm, SBS: ``It takes twooo to tango so let's dooo the tango ... the dance of love."Wise words from Chubby Checker but unlikely to excite viewers repulsed by Clive James's attempts to learn the tango during one of his interminable sorties to the world's major cities. What's new in Buenos Aires? Has Clive finally buggered off to drool over busty babes in other capitals? Michael Krass arrives in the Argentine capital in a mood considerably less than gruntled. But when he hails a taxi and meets Travis Bickle or, rather, Alex, the cabdriver things begin to look up.

On the Night of the Fire (1940): aka The Fugitive

11.55pm, ABC: Ralph Richardson features as a barber named Will Kobling who shaves a small sum from someone so his wife Kit (Diana Wynyard) can indulge her desire to shop till she drops. When Kit pays for some curtains with one of the stolen banknotes, it is traced back to her and the opportunistic draper decides to blackmail the Koblings rather than dob them in to the police. The hairdresser responds by killing him. No splitting hairs with Will! Kit goes for a drive to escape the heat as the cops close in and, in an early example of zero tolerance, kill her husband. She dies when her car is involved in a collision. The End. Moral: crime doesn't pay.

Total fluff

all day and night, 10: Scanning the program schedules to determine which night is the week's most abject in terms of television viewing is a lost cause. Last night's line-up on Seven seemed as woeful as they come, but Ten, never one to be outdone when it comes to tripe, has a mesmerisingly frightful array of programs on offer today. Apart from the 8.30pm film, Tootsie (rpt), the network's schedule for the day is as crook as it gets. Another utterly unnecessary demonstration that wall-to-wall bilge is no mere accident but a premeditated response to the perceived stupidity of the audience. A mediocre man is always at his best in the land of the one-eyed man. And if the one-eyed man casts his good orb in the direction of Seven, there's no relief in sight.

Asylum (1972)

11.35pm, 9: Four short horror tales by Robert Bloch comprise this compile which boasts the beauty of Charlotte Rampling and the distinctive acting talent of Britt Ekland. The director of an asylum (Patrick Magee) decides to test the diagnostic skills of a young shrink (Robert Powell), applying for a position at the facility by having him suss out which of the gibbering inmates is a former colleague driven round the twist by the ambience.

The last segment, featuring Herbert Lom and a murderous mannequin, is done with some flair. Released in the US as House of Crazies (``You have nothing to lose but your mind"), the film is also graced by the presence of Peter Cushing, Robert Morse, a discombobulated Sylvia Sims wreaking revenge on Richard Todd and Barbara Parkins and Megs Jenkins. Very few of these remain upright by the final curtain.

The Big Picture

9.30pm, ABC: The lunatics on parade in Asylum pale into relative sanity beside the madmen orchestrating events assayed in this awful chapter of history.

The epic waste of life and the cruelty initiated by madmen playing desperate games in the struggle for control of the Soviet Union in 1941 reach their zenith as Operation Barbarossa dies in its tracks along with millions of soldiers and civilians.

FOXTEL

MOVIE 10.20pm: Hideous Kinky (Showtime)

Kate Winslet, Said Taghmaoui. A penniless single mother and her two daughters try to make a go of things in Morocco in the 1970s.

OPTUS

MOVIE 10.30pm: Beloved (Movie One)

Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover. A young woman calling herself Beloved brings back haunting memories for a former slave.

SPORT 11.30am: Hockey (ESPN)

Philadelphia v Pittsburgh.

RADIO

Jazz Pure And Simple, 7pm, 2MBS-FM

Mentored by Thelonius Monk and Cootie Williams, Bud Powell was hampered by a head injury sustained during a racial incident in 1945. He spent a lot of time in sanatoriums, but when he played ... Wow! He was a wondrously fluent bop pianist with a renowned melodic style, yet playing on piano the sort of freestyle linear forms the great wind players pursued.