Film choice
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Your support makes all the difference.Dudley Moore is perfectly cast as the elf who rebels in Jeannot Szwarc's Santa Claus (3.05pm BBC1). This silly caper can't help making you yearn for the simple days of Pete and Dud before Moore got seduced by the bright lights of Hollywood.
Brian Glover is a man of many parts. A former professional wrestler, he was the voice behind the Tetley teamen ads and the teacher in Kes (Boxing Day C4). He is also a writer, penning Singleton's Pluck (7.20pm C4), a quirky drama about a farmer (Ian Holm) who decides to beat a seasonal pluckers' strike by walking his flock of 500 geese the 100 miles to London. This unusual film is directed by Richard Eyre, now head of the Royal National Theatre.
John McTiernan is a top-rank action director; he brought pizazz to the cartoonish adventures of Bruce Willis in Die Hard and utilised the same sense of style the previous year on Predator (10pm ITV). In this taut thriller, Arnold Schwarzenegger flexes his pecs as a crack commando up against a ferocious alien enemy in the Latin American jungle.
Antonio Banderas (the star of Assassins and currently being groomed by Hollywood as "the new Valentino") and Armand Assante (the baddie in Judge Dredd) are two Cuban musicians trying to make it in America after the War in Arne Glimcher's sparkling debut, The Mambo Kings (9.15pm BBC2).
Milos Forman has had many finer moments - Amadeus, to name but one - than Hair (12.10am BBC2), a terminally dated version of the Broadway musical about an Oklahoman who falls in with the flower-power bunch in Manhattan, a few days before he is supposed to go and fight in Vietnam.
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