BY CLIF GARBODEN

THURSDAY 29

7:00 (2) Greater Boston. Convention coverage. The Office of Homeland Security raises the alert color to something in the infrared spectrum, cordons off Boston, cancels the election, and quarantines the Electoral College at Guantánamo. (Until 9 p.m.)

10:00 (10) Convention Stuff from NBC. It’s all over but the shouting by now. When you shout, shout, "Fuck Bush!" And get your scrawny ass out there and vote. John Kerry did not approve this listing. (Until 11 p.m.)

5:00 a.m. (44) Soundstage. Featuring music from Michael McDonald and Ashford and Simpson. (Until 6 a.m.)

FRIDAY 30

2:30 a.m. (2) Mystery: Foyle’s War: Among the Few. Repeated from last week. In this WW2 home-front detective story, DCI Foyle (Michael Kitchen) sees his son fly off to bomb Germany and his driver, Sam (Honeysuckle Weeks), go undercover to expose a fuel-pilfering racket. Murder, sexual indiscretions, and scandal follow. (Until 4 a.m.)

SATURDAY 31

1:00 (64) Baseball. The Baltimore Orioles versus the New York Yankees.

4:00 (6) Basketball. The Indiana Fever versus the Houston Comets in WNBA play.

6:30 (2) Great Performances: Kiss Me, Kate. Repeated from last week. Michael Blakemore directed this recent Broadway revival (Tony for Best Revival) of Cole Porter’s musical about on- and off-stage romance during a touring-company run of The Taming of the Shrew. Brent Barrett, Rachel York, Nancy Anderson, and Michael Berresse star. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (6) October Sky (movie). Jake Gyllenhaal, Chris Cooper, and Laura Dern star in a pretty good 1999 movie (based in fact) about a coal miner’s son who after the Soviets launch Sputnik decides to join the space race and designs and builds his own rocket. (Until 10 p.m.)

8:00 (10) The Talented Mr. Ripley (movie). Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Cate Blanchett team up in this 1999 movie adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel about a working-class pretender to European high society — a condition he achieves by murdering the swell whose identity he assumes. Engaging performances and a fine and intricate plot that doesn’t, as a film, hang together. Fun, though. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Great Performances: Concert for George. Not Bush, you idiot. An expanded (from the theatrical version), 120-minute edition of the November 2002 Royal Albert Hall concert to mark the anniversary of the death of George Harrison. Lots of tribute numbers plus interviews. Featuring Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Jools Holland, Jeff Lynne, the cast of Monty Python, Tom Petty, Billy Preston, Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, and Harrison’s son, Dhani. To be repeated on Sunday at 5 p.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

11:00 (2) Soundstage. Featuring music from Lisa Marie Presley and Peter Wolf. (Until midnight.)

SUNDAY 1

1:00 (2) The American Experience: Public Enemy. Repeated from last week. Back in 1933, John Dillinger (confused with Robin Hood) was quite the popular figure. He was also kind of a thug. And worst of all, his eventual capture catapulted that asshole J. Edgar Hoover to permanent fame. Here’s the whole ugly story. To be repeated tonight at 1 a.m. (Until 2 p.m.)

2:00 (4) Baseball. The Sox versus the Minnesota Twins.

4:05 (44) The Man Who Came to Dinner (movie). Repeated from last week. Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Monty Woolley, Jimmy Durante, and Billie Burke are the all-star (in 1942) cast of this pretty tedious stage drama about a pompous radio celebrity who moves in on an Ohio family, fakes an injury to extend his stay, and tries to solve their problems. (Until 6 p.m.)

6:00 (44) Captain Horatio Hornblower (movie). One of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower yarns directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Gregory Peck (in the title role) plus Virginia Mayo. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Evening at Pops. John Williams is back for this show because it’s a tribute to movie music and besides, the guy just won’t go away. Tonight’s movie-music tributes go to Bernard Herrmann (Vertigo, Psycho) and Henry Mancini (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther). Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards show up for the Mancini segment, as does Henry’s daughter, Monica, to do "Moon River." The theme from Psycho is something to sing in the shower; "Moon River" is a song everybody likes even though the lyrics make absolutely no sense. (Until 9 p.m.)

8:00 (44) The Three Musketeers (movie). The 1948 edition, we assume (though Channel 2 doesn’t seem to think it an important distinction). Quick, name three Musketeers! Aramis, d’Artagnan, Porthos, Athos. Okay, that’s four. Good work. It’s d’Artagnan who doesn’t qualify until the end of the movie. The whole thing is silly anyway. If this is indeed the 56-year-old version, look for Gene Kelly as d’Artagnan, Lana Turner as Milady, June Allyson as Constance, Van Heflin as Athos, Gig Young as Porthos, Robert Coote as Aramis, Angela Lansbury as Queen Anne, and Vincent Price as Cardinal Richelieu. There’s also a 1921 version with Douglas Fairbanks, a 1939 version with Don Ameche and the Ritz Brothers, a 1973 version with Michael York, Oliver Reed, and Raquel Welch, and a 1993 version with Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, and Rebecca De Mornay. Any of these would do. (Until 9:45 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Mystery: Foyle’s War, Series 2: War Games. Even in war, some people insist on selling stuff to the enemy. That’s the background to tonight’s puzzler about a dead secretary in London and a dead Home Guardsman out in Hastings (DCI Foyle’s territory). To be repeated tonight at 4 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 1 and 4 a.m. (Until 11 p.m.)

9:45 (44) Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (movie). The secondary title to this is Or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours 11 Minutes. Around the mid 1960s, some Hollywood marketing wit must have noticed that the turn-of-the-century generation was dying off and with it would go a lot of opportunities for campy movies about men with handlebar moustaches doing jolly-ho! kinds of things. Thus we got Blake Edwards’s 1965 The Great Race and this tedious period piece about early aviation starring Stuart Whitman, Sarah Miles, and James Fox. (Until 12:03 a.m.)

MONDAY 2

8:00 (44) Globe Trekker: Northern Spain. Trekker Shilpa Mehta flamenco-dances in Barcelona and goes to a casteller festival to watch Catalans build human castles. Then it’s on to Pamplona for some bull running and wandering through the Basque wilderness. (Until 9 p.m.)

10:00 (2) The American Experience: Partners of the Heart. The documentary treatment of the true story upon which the recent HBO movie Something the Lord Made (with Alan Rickman and Mos Def) was based. Depression-era surgeon Alfred Blalock and his African-American assistant Vivien Thomas teamed up at Vanderbilt and, after moving to Johns Hopkins, developed a heart operation to save the lives of victims of blue-baby syndrome. (Until 10:58 p.m.)

1:00 a.m. (44) "IT": A Phish Concert Special. A whole lotta jammin’ in Limestone, Maine (just eight miles south of the tundra), with 60,000 adoring fans. To be repeated, on Channel 2, tonight at 4 a.m., and on Wednesday at 10 p.m., and on Thursday at 2:30 a.m. (Until 2:30 a.m.)

2:30 a.m. (44) Fiesta in the Sky. On a mild day in October, the hot-air balloons drooped on the runway. Giant Norway rats scurried among them hoping to scavenge some lunches left over from the previous day’s ascents. Without warning, a platoon of Green Berets opened fire, deflating all but the blue-and-white balloon over in the corner by the Coke machine. (Until 3 a.m.)

5:30 a.m. (2) Fiesta in the Sky. Moe Fresca struggled to get his keyboard into the basket of the hot-air balloon in his driveway. If everything went according to plan, he’d be airborne within a hour and headed for a mid-air rendezvous with the rest of his band, the Darling Dingling Dangles, for the first-ever live rock fest in the clouds. (Until 6 a.m.)

TUESDAY 3

8:00 (2) Nova: The Last Flight of Bomber 31. A team of experts (in what, we’re not sure) heads to a volcano in Siberia to study the remains of a Navy bomber that disappeared over the Bering Strait in 1944. To be repeated tonight at 1:30 and 4 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 1 and 5 a.m. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Real Olympics: Death of Glory. A show — actually a series of shows — for which absolutely no information is available. Are there unreal Olympics? Who dies in the Olympics? What’s this about? Repeated a lot, but who cares? (Our patience has worn a bit thin with lack of the info from TV stations seeking publicity in this paperless society. Could we look the show up somewhere else? Perhaps. But life is getting short.) (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (44) Independent Lend: Cosmopolitan. Roshan Seth stars as a Indian-American who tries to win the affections of a divorced neighbor (Carol Kane) after his wife runs off. Unfortunately, he get all his advice from Cosmo. (Until 11 p.m.)

10:00 (2) Great Performances: From Acropolis. In honor of the 2004 Olympics (which should be happening any week now), Greece is hosting a many-months-long Hellenic Festival (who else is so qualified), and as part of that, the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle in the Herodes Atticus amphitheater is doing a concert that features Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, with soloist Daniel Barenboim. To be repeated on Thursday at 1 a.m. (Until 11:28 p.m.)

3:00 a.m. (44) P.O.V.: A Family Undertaking. A look at the (apparently re-emerging) home-funeral movement. Yes, just as your ancestors did, you can bury your own dead, thus saving the cost of paying a mortician and, as this show suggests, reacquainting yourself with life’s only inevitable event. Practice on somebody else, okay. (Until 4 a.m.)

WEDNESDAY 4

8:00 (2) Secrets of the Dead: Amazon Warrior Women. PBS isn’t exactly the place you’d expect to be invited to learn about "beautiful, bloodthirsty, female warriors." That would more likely be a topic for an Army training film. But this show looks at the possible realities behind the myths. And did we mention that it’s about "beautiful, bloodthirsty, female warriors?" To be repeated tonight 1:30 and 4 a.m., and on Channel 44 at 3 and 5 a.m. (Until 9 p.m.)

THURSDAY 5

9:00 (2) Wide Angle: Dying To Leave. Tonight’s topic is illegal immigration, a practice participated in by an estimated two to four million people annually. Eight examples — including interviews with people who slipped across borders and survived — demonstrate the worldwide scope of the problem. To be repeated tonight at 5 a.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

5:00 a.m. (44) Soundstage. Featuring music from Cyndi Lauper. (Until 6 a.m.)