TODAY'S TELEVISION

Remember all those films which tried selling themselves as "this year's Four Weddings and a Funeral"? Well, now it's Trainspotting which is finding its name bandied about like a lucky charm. In the case of Twin Town, a raucous tale of joy-riding and drug-taking in Swansea, it's "the Welsh Trainspotting" - enough to prejudice you against a movie before it starts. Such brazen dressing up in another movie's success.

Shoot Out in Swansea: the Making of Twin Town (Sat BBC2) sounds like one of those behind-the-scenes movie plugs that pad out ITV's weekend afternoon schedules. Happily it's not, rather it takes a candid look at the often fraught realities of making a low-budget British movie - squeezing an eight-week shoot into six weeks with a first-time director at the wheel. This turns out to be Kevin Allen, brother of bad boy Keith, and whom I once saw fronting a video diary about Italia 90 and, more recently, playing one of the sneering plain clothes coppers in The Thin Blue Line. He seems remarkably relaxed about the responsibility - ignorance is bliss perhaps - so relaxed, in fact, that the producer virtually sleeps on his shoulder, much to Allen's chagrin. Oh well, at least he gets his revenge on older brother Keith for all those ritual humiliations of teenage boyhood - posing him half way up a windswept Welsh hillside with a sheep munching at his crutch. "Don't worry, she won't bite," says the farmer. We won't ask.

In which situations, exactly, does Kenny Dalglish unclench his teeth and start becoming expansive and voluble? I always imagined that whilst playing 18 holes with his famous chum, Alan Hansen, Kenny would unwind, but that was before I saw The Sack Race (Sat BBC2), Hansen's look at the pressures and pitfalls of football management. Maybe it's just the presence of cameras, but, gently quizzed by his mate on the fairways of some north- eastern golf course, Dalglish is as tight-lipped as at a post-defeat match conference.

Not that any of the managers we see in action in the half-time dressing rooms seem to have a clue about psychology or man management. They just stand bellowing at the collective (ie no one in particular) while the players stare glumly at their boots. And what exactly does "think positive" mean to someone returning to the pitch. Surely he wants something more specific like "knobble their number seven".

If you've ever idly wondered about whatever happened to Kelly McGillis, the slightly bovine beauty whose piercing blue-eyed glances at Tom Cruise in Top Gun and at Harrison Ford in Witness are now part of movie iconography - then tune in to Bitter Blood (Sat, Sun BBC1). This two-part mini series states immediately that it's based on real events (ie no dramatist would dare) and finds a semi-crazy McGillis shacking up with a mad survivalist (Harry Hamlin in a beard) and plotting against her former husband (Keith Carradine).

Everyman (Sun BBC1) checks out the shortlist of those likely to be the next Pope (apparently "the papacy of John Paul II is entering its final phase"), going behind the scenes to reveal some of the secrets of the Conclave, the Papal election process. To the Ends of the Earth (Sun C4) goes in the opposite direction, deep into the Haitian countryside to meet a certain Wilfrid Dorissant, a man who has made legal history by being recognised by the authorities as a zombie (his uncle is accused of doing it to him). The first encounter finds Dorissant held in stocks, "because he doesn't have a spirit". I wonder if the same might work for Liverpool FC.