BY CLIF GARBODEN

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.)

FRIDAY 6

9:00 (10) Miss Teen USA. We always list these pageants, but mostly out of habit. They used to be the campiest thing on TV. Now they seem downright respectable compared with Who’s Afraid To Marry My Amish Half-Sister? and such. The nubiles gather in Palm Springs for a shot at succeeding Tami Farrell (the reigning Miss T.). Hosts include Vanessa Minnillo (the 1998 winner) and Tony Potts (whoever he is, from Access Hollywood). You never heard of the judges, either (Mickey Glazer, who produces Fear Factor, for example). And JC Chasez (a musician whom we admit we’re too out of it to know about) performs. (Until 11 p.m.)

3:00 a.m. (2) Globe Trekker: Northern Spain. Repeated from last week. Trekker Shilpa Mehta flamenco-dances in Barcelona (actually, he should be doing the sardana, but never mind) 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 4 a.m.)

SATURDAY 7

1:00 (64) Baseball. The New York Mets versus the St. Louis Cardinals, or the Oakland A’s versus the Minnesota Twins.

2:00 (44) Lawrence Welk Milestone Events. And Welk traveled many a mile. Unfortunately, aside from bringing populist pop (read "less than totally hip") to prime-time TV and earning the well-deserved title Squarest of the Square, Larry didn’t do much positive for our culture. Yet his was a popular folly, and when PBS goes begging for funds, it always drags him out as a cultural icon (which he was, but only for people too dimwitted to appreciate public television). This is a reunion concert of Welk-family folk from 2000. (Until 5 p.m.)

6:00 (2) Peter, Paul and Mary: Carry It On. Since music writers tend to be so trendy that they sometimes have trouble putting in perspective anything that happened more than a month ago, aging folk trio PP&M have put together this story to give credit to themselves and the heavier-handed fellow travelers of the early-’60s Village folk scene for providing the background score to the cultural revolution. Included in this we have vintage clips of such landmark performances as PP&M singing "Blowin’ in the Wind" at Martin Luther King’s 1963 march on DC. To be repeated on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Magic Moments: The Best of ’50s Pop. An oldies reunion concert (usually a bittersweet affair what with all the aged sex symbols showing up in wheelchairs) hosted by Mary Lou Metzger (from The Lawrence Welk Show), Phyllis McGuire (of the McGuire Sisters act), and Pat Boone (the man who took the Frutti out of Tutti) from the Trump Taj in Atlantic City. It won’t just be sad reflections of a half-century past, though; the special includes oldie performance clips and even some vintage news clips. Performing survivors include Debbie Reynolds, Patti Page, the Chordettes, the Crew Cuts, the Four Lads, the Four Coins, the Four Aces, Gogi Grant, and Don Cherry. Plus tributes to departed ancients Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, and Dean Martin. Dr. Joyce Brothers and Fess "Davy Crockett" Parker are also on hand. To be repeated on Thursday at 7 p.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

8:00 (6) Mystic Pizza (movie). Annabeth Gish, Julia Roberts, and Lili Taylor star in this 1988 coming-of-age tale centered on the queen-worthy dramas of three teens working in a Connecticut pizza parlor. (Until 10 p.m.)

8:00 (10) The Replacements (movie). Keanu Reeves, Gene Hackman, and Brooke Langton star in a better-than-expected (but still not exactly good) 2000 comedy/drama about a bunch of football hacks filling in for striking pros. (Until 10 p.m.)

5:30 a.m. (44) Fiesta in the Sky. Don’t know about you, but we do all our Channels 2 and 44 pledging during airings of this truly wretched hot-air-ballooning documentary. "Whew! We escaped that awful man," said the winsome blonde Becca. "Now how do we get home." "Don’t worry," answered the slightly nerdish Rodney. "I have my hot-air balloon parked behind the old barn. Come fly with me, Becca." "Okay, but not until you change your shirt," she cautioned. "Hawaiian prints are so 1980s." (Until 6 a.m.)

SUNDAY 8

5:00 (44) Great Performances: Broadway’s Lost Treasures. The sequel to this will be aired on Channel 2 at 7:30 p.m. tonight. Here we have the first collection of performance clips by Broadway originals as first broadcast on the Tony Awards shows. Jerry Orbach, Chita Rivera, Carol Channing, Zero Mostel, and the truly creepy Joel Grey (in whiteface). (Until 7 p.m.)

7:30 (2) Great Performances: Broadway’s Lost Treasures 2. A second collection of classic Broadway performances culled from old Tony Awards shows. Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur do Mame’s "Bosom Buddies"; Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman duet through hits from Phantom; Gregory Hines fronts the cast of Jelly’s Last Jam; and Julie Andrews goes nostalgic for Camelot and My Fair Lady. To be repeated on Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. on Channel 44. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Mystery: Foyle’s War: The Funk Hole. Tonight we learn a new term: funk hole. Is it 1) a hotel room once occupied by George Clinton?; 2) a hotel for long-term residents?; or 3) something you’re no longer allowed to discuss on television? Well, it’s #2 (believe it or not), and this WW2 home-front detective story takes Inspector Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) to one. To be repeated tonight at 4 a.m., and at 1 and 4 a.m. on Channel 44, and on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. on Channel 44 (Until 11 p.m.)

MONDAY 9

8:00 (6) Football. Just in time for an August heat wave. The Washington Redskins and the Denver Broncos in the annual Hall of Fame Game from Canton, Ohio, part of the NFL’s Hall of Fame weekend.

8:00 (44) Globe Trekker: Peru. Not, mind you, "Darkest Peru" of Paddington fame. Trekker Neil Gibson hikes the Andes, plods through the Amazon jungle, flies over Lake Titicaca, and celebrates a potato harvest. Lots of scenery; not as much fun as Ian Wright would have on the same trek. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) History Detectives: Ventriloquist Dummy, Witch’s House, and Poems. The History Detectives’ pursuit of the basically unimportant and obvious (as an excuse to tell a sometimes interesting background story) considers the following. A woman has a black ventriloquist’s dummy named Sam in her attic; her father was a famous African-American ventriloquist. Coincidence? Next, did a house in Essex, Massachusetts, once belong to the Queen of Hell (circa the witch hunts of the 1600s)? And did a Chinese-American woman’s ancestor carve one of the poems in the wall of the Angel Island immigration station where immigrants from the Far East were detained in the early 1900s? To be repeated on Wednesday at 2 a.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (2) Great Performances: The Verbier Festival. A "piano extravaganza" (10th-anniversary edition) from Switzerland featuring classical faves performed by Claude Frank, Evgeny Kissin, James Levine, Emanuel Ax, Staffan Scheja, Lang Lang, and Mikhail Pletnev. (Until 11 p.m.)

TUESDAY 10

7:30 (2) La Plaza. Featuring music from pianist Danilo Pérez. (Until 8 p.m.)

8:00 (2) Nova: Battle Plan under Fire. So the US armed forces (currently pinned down in Iraq) have weapons that can kill a gerbil from 31,000 feet without disturbing his water dish. But that’s not much good when somebody blows up a Yugo in your tent. A look at the science of modern war and how it may have failed us at last. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) Alan Alda and Scientific American Frontiers: Future Car. Alan Alda drives a petrol-electric hybrid car and visits plants where people are developing hydrogen-powered four-wheelers and other innovations that would make the Middle East economically irrelevant to the US. To be repeated on Thursday at 1:30 a.m. (Until 10 p.m.)

9:00 (44) Independent Lens: Sumo East and West. Remember how odd it felt when you learned that the Japanese were playing baseball? Well, we got back at them by introducing international athletes to the Rising Sun sport of sumo wrestling — a thoroughly unappealing art, but one now open to fat men everywhere. (Until 10 p.m.)

10:00 (44) Indie Select: Anima. A difficult-to-explain film about an elderly German couple in rural New York who keep puppets to act out the story of Germany under Hitler and harbor a dark secret. (Until 11:30 p.m.)

1:00 a.m. (44) Nova: The Secret of Photo 51. A fortuitously timely airing coinciding with the recent death of DNA discoverer Francis Crick. This show explores the work of Rosalind Franklin, a biologist who didn’t get so much as a footnote when Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins collected their Nobel Prize in 1962. By that time, Franklin was dead of cancer that she likely got from taking x-rays of DNA molecules for the boys. To be repeated tonight at 4 a.m. on Channel 2. (Until 2 a.m.)

WEDNESDAY 11

7:00 (2) An Evening with Nat King Cole. A collection of song clips from Cole’s short-lived 1960 TV show (only 15 minutes long and the first to have a black headliner). Great music, great personality, back-yard production values, and worth watching. (Until 9 p.m.)

9:00 (2) André Rieu: Live in Tuscany. Okay, that’s one. Now, where’s bin Laden? (Until 11 p.m.)

9:00 (6) Remarkable Journey Landmark: Ticket to Freedom: the Underground Railroad. A documentary special on the famous slave-escape system broadcast to coincide with the opening of Cincinnati’s National Freedom Center. (Until 9:30 p.m.)

1:00 a.m. (44) Great Performances: Little Women. The Houston Grand Opera’s adaptation (by composer Mark Adamo) from L.M. Alcott and featuring Stephanie Novacek (Jo), Joyce DiDonato (Meg), Chad Shelton (Laurie), Margaret Lloyd (Amy), Stacey Tappan (Beth), and Gwendolyn Jones (Alma). To be repeated tonight at 4 a.m. on Channels 2 and 44. (Until 3 a.m.)

THURSDAY 12

9:00 (2) The Legacy of Jim Croce. A tribute to the "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" composer, who died in a plane crash when he was only 30. Featuring rare old ’70s TV clips of Jim doing his most enduring pop hits. (Until 11 p.m.)