MONDAY - PAY TV: [First Edition]

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PAY TV REVIEWS: Chasing Time: Shanghai; 5th Gear; Melting Pot; Bridge on the River Kwai

PAY TV REVIEWS: Chasing Time: Shanghai; 5th Gear; Melting Pot; Bridge on the River Kwai

Chasing Time: Shanghai, A1, 7.30PM

One foreign city, two contestants, eight challenges, 12 hours. Succeed and they win five nights of top accommodation; fail and they're flown out tonight in disgrace. As if travel isn't stressful enough, I got a tension headache just watching Pam and Clive shoot around Shanghai in the first of a new series of the global game show. They set such a cracking pace solving the cryptic clues, you see quite a lot of the city. Shanghai is a fast-changing metropolis of 13 million people, few of whom speak English. But they're a friendly lot, keen to help these Londoners find phoenix claws, a Chinese circus and assorted oriental oddities.

5th Gear, Lifestyle, 8.30pm

Compared with BBC World's Top Gear, this Channel Five motoring series is but a Holden to a Ferrari. Presenters Tiff Needell and Jason Plato may be skilled drivers, but they're boys with toys, tearing around the track like lads with neither wit nor style. The car tests are informed but they're uninspired and longer than Le Mans. Some of the stories are of doubtful relevance to Australia. But there is one noteworthy yarn in the first episode of the new series - an energy-absorbing lamppost designed to crumple on impact. The British marketing manager believes in them so much, he has "a Victor Kayam moment", driving into one at 80 km/h - with interesting results.

Melting Pot, Lifestyle Food, 8pm

Chefs from varied cultural backgrounds pass on their families' favourite culinary traditions in a smorgasbord of 58 episodes celebrating the history and ancestry of Latin America, Eastern Europe, Spain, the Mediterranean, Asia and southern India. Tonight, Pilar and Rocco prepare Sunday supper Mediterranean-style, with a vampire-busting menu of her dad's garlic soup and his nonna's lasagne. The presenters are pleasant, but unlike the spicy menu, rather bland.

Bridge on the River Kwai, National Geographic, 10.30pm

This affecting documentary offers a different take on the story of the infamous Thai-Burma railway, designed by the Japanese and built with the slave labour of 250,000 Allied PoWs. It brings together a young Thai-born engineer in awe of the bridge as a feat of engineering, a Japanese war veteran and engineer who worked on it as an overseer, and an Australian PoW. Two engineers can't see beyond the achievement. But as the journey unfolds against a backdrop of dramatic reconstructions, archival images and the testimony of survivors, they are confronted by the enormity of it.

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Caption: PHOTO