Comedy starring Buster Keaton, Charlotte Greenwood
An itinerant is taken up by high society and assumed to be a lothario.
Director Edward Sedgwick (1931) black and white.
* See Films: pages 50-55 * *

Musical comedy starring
Lucille Ball , Dick Powell
When Broadway star Julie Hampton meets welder and playwright "Swanee"
Swanson, she agrees to stage his musical. Director Charles Reisner (1944)
Black and white
♦ See Films: pages 50-55 ★★★

Epic saga set in ancient India. Guru Vishnu Gupta sentences Pauravraj to death.

Comedian and actor Sanjeev Bhaskar is a guest on the Asian arts magazine. Two
Bollywood playback singers discuss their album, and there's a viewer's poll on the best films. With Mo Dutta and Rajesh Mirchandani.
PHONE NUMBER: (0121)

An all-male team from the West Midlands, a group of journalists and eight Hindu student representatives compete for a prize of Ll,000 to donate to charity.
Hosted by Sahera Chohan.
TEAMS: to take part. send an SAE to: [address removed]

Pathé news footage.
Black and white

Soup recipes.
(Repeat)

Another chance to see Barry Norman 's selection of cinema highlights from 1996. Shown on Monday 23 December on BBC1

Oscar-winning drama, the first of today's Saturday Matinee double bill of films directed by Vincente Minnelli.
Starring Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner

When a Hollywood producer calls together a writer, a director and a star, they are curious to know his purpose.

(1952, PG) (Black and white) ****
See Films: pages 50-55

Drama, the second Saturday Matinee Vincente Minnelli film.
Starring Frank Sinatra , Dean Martin , Shirley MacLaine
Fresh out of the army, one-time writer Dave Hirsh arrives back in his hometown, where he becomes involved with a gambler and two women. Showing in widescreen format.
Dave Hirsh Frank Sinatra, Bama Dillert Dean Martin, Ginny Moorhead Shirley Maclaine, Frank Hirsh Arthur Kennedy. Gwen French Martha Hyer
(1958. PG)....
# See Films: pages 50-55 ***

Hits from the Top of the Pops archives, plus today's chart sounds. Stereo. Top of the Pops is on Friday at 7.30pm on BBC1

Further live coverage of the first round of the 1997 World Professional Darts championship from the Lakeside Country Club, Frimley Green, Surrey.
Over the next nine days, 32 players will compete for the £158,000 first prize, and there is a £52,000 incentive for achieving a nine-dart checkout.
Three first-round matches, each the best of five sets, are to be played this afternoon. One of them is scheduled to pit the number one seed Martin Adams against 1994 world champion John Part from Canada. Introduced by Dougie Donnelly. Commentary by Tony Green.
Executive producer Keith Mackenzie

Presented by Andrew Harvey. Subtitled
Weather Suzanne Charlton ........

Robert Fox of The Daily Telegraph peruses the week's newspapers. Director Vernon Antcliffe
Producer Brian Blake

Subtitled Self-portrait in December, JLG/JLG is a complex and personal film by the director Jean-Luc Godard. With Francois Truffaut, Godard was one of the guiding forces in the late fifties and sixties of the French New Wave, a cinema movement that has influenced many film-makers. His features include A Bout de Souffle (1959), Alphaville (1965) and Weekend (1967). In recent years he has worked in Switzerland on analytical films that contemplate the film-making process.
Tonight's edition of TX features the director in his editing room. By freely juxtaposing passages of classical music, movie quotes and shots of Lake Geneva, Godard improvises a story which intertwines his own experiences and his thoughts on 20th-century film history. In French with English subtitles.

Highlights of this afternoon's first-round matches, including a look at those scheduled to involve reigning champion Steve Beaton and 1996 semi-finalist
Andy "The Viking" Fordham.

To mark his 50th birthday on Wednesday, David Bowie talks candidly about his three decades in popular music and his plans forthe future with the BBC's director of programmes Alan Yentob, who made the Omnibus documentary Cracked Actor about the star in 1975. Among topics discussed are Bowie's friendship with singer Marc Bolan, and his collaborations with other artists, notably musician Brian Eno. There is also archive footage of Bowie in concert, and the model for one of his seventies incarnations, Ziggy Stardust, is revealed. Two films starring David Bowie, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, follow.
See today's choices.

(The documentary Changesnowbowie is on Wednesday at 9pm on Radio 1)

Second World War drama based on a novel and stories by Laurens van der Post, who died in December, the first of tonight's two films starring David Bowie
Also starring Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto
Java, 1942: a young Japanese camp commandant tries to impose strict discipline on his captives. At the same time he holds a grudging respect for the prisoners' liaison officer Colonel Lawrence, who can speak Japanese.
But the arrival of a new British prisoner, Major Jack Celliers, initiates a stern test of will for both sides. Ryuichi Sakamoto, who plays Captain Yonoi, also provides the film's atmospheric soundtrack.
Director Nagisa Oshima (1982, 15)
? See Films: pages 50-55 ****

This legendary 1973 concert concludes a double bill of films starring David Bowie
At the end of a successful world tour.
David Bowie - then adopting the flamboyant and exotic persona of Ziggy Stardust- announced his retirement from the stage. This final concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon was filmed by director DA Pennebaker , famous for such sixties rock documentaries as Don't Look Back, which chronicled Bob Dylan 's concert tour, and MontereyPop, the film of the legendary 1967 rock festival.
The 17 songs performed here, taken from Bowie's early seventies albums, include Ziggy Stardust , Oh! You Pretty
Things, Changes, Time, Suffragette City and Rock'n' Roll Suicide. Onstage
Bowie is backed by his band at the time, the Spiders from Mars -the late Mick Ronson (guitar), Mick Woodmansey (drums) and Trevor Bolder (bass).
(1982, PG) Stereo ..........................
* See Films: pages 50-55 ***
Followed by Weatherview