Television preview

Recommended viewing this weekend

I think they've found a way of getting to Clint Eastwood. You don't send a posse of horse-riding, baccy-chewing desperados after him - or some crazed psycho street punk. No, you sit him down in the midst of an audience of his Hollywood peers and you get them to say nice things about him. Clint Eastwood's Achilles heel is his embarrassment, and you've never seen someone squirm like our man in the AFI Clint Eastwood Tribute (Sat C4), part of tonight's Clint Night on Channel Four.

As far as theme nights go, Clint Night is a bit thin - consisting of the above programme (a bit cheesy, but they include all the great clips), a rather silly sounding debate about who was the greatest - Clint or John Wayne - an episode of Rawhide (which Channel 4 shows on Sunday mornings, anyway) and a couple of his movies. There doesn't seem to be any peg for it except that BBC2 is having a theme evening tonight - its excuse being the 40th anniversary of the BBC's Natural History Unit.

The centrepiece of this affair is a programme called The Restless Year (Sat BBC2), in which the four seasons in the Cotswolds countryside are captured using time-lapse photography. My personal highlight was the sight of a marrow growing at this exaggerated speed, but on the whole the result is strangely dull. I think we're all too used to this time-lapse business.

Also a bit of a disappointment is the BBC's canny combining of costume and detective dramas in a two-part adaptation of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (Sun BBC2). Maybe the problem is with Collins's source book, which I haven't read but of which I have heard many excellent things. On this evidence, the dramatisation is very much sub-Conan Doyle.

The moonstone of the title is a large diamond stolen by a British army officer from a Hindu temple. The priests of this sacred building are very keen to get it back - and indeed turn up disguised as travelling jugglers on said army officer's descendents' Yorkshire doorstep with that very intention. But did they steal it from heiress Keeley Hawes's dressing- table drawer? Enter Antony Sher hamming it up rotten as the detective on the case. They ought to give him a series. Only, just as long as they don't give Richard Wilson a series to make further films in the likeness of Way Out West (Sun BBC1), in which the star of One Foot in the Grave is sent along to a working cattle ranch in Wyoming, USA to see if they can't make a cowboy out of him. They can't.

Women at Play (Sun C4) exchanges its usual Thursday night slot for a Sunday one and takes a look at the women involved in the casino gaming business - as punters and as croupiers - and then further up the hierachy. Apparently, more and more women are taking to gambling at roulette and blackjack - attracted by the tightly regulated (and therefore unthreatening) world offered by casinos.

Just Dancing Around? (Sun C4), Channel 4's short series in which film- makers spy on the creative processes of a leading international choreographer, has director Mark James on former avant-garde "doyenne" (ie she's over 60) Trisha Brown. James's film finds Brown embarking on a new piece entitled MO, a typically fluid and inventive creation set to Bach's Musical Offering.