The assembled company messes around in the picturesque desert of Utah (Montana acted as scenery double) for a couple of hours, destroying more helicopters than you might have thought feasible, while Travolta grins broadly and stares meanly just like potty villains are supposed to. Travolta, an embittered Stealth plane pilot (you can tell he's a bad 'un from the outset by his fey manner of chainsmoking), hijacks a couple of bombs and blackmails Washington, but has not reckoned on the true grit of young Slater and the plucky gel park ranger (Samantha Mathis) he meets after being involuntarily ejected. It's a sickening barrage of booms, bangs, thuds, crashes, splats and pings, starting with the impact of boxing glove on flesh - John Travolta punching the tar out of his sidekick Christian Slater - and building up to a thermonuclear explosion (the most enjoyable sight in the movie).The excuse for all this racket is a premise straight out of Connery-vintage Bond, as reworked by the author of Speed, Graham Yost. If he made the same demands on his sound team on Broken Arrow (15), the poor overworked souls would be in sanatoria by now, since watching the film with unprotected ears compares unfavourably with an afternoon on an artillery range.

Compounding his hubris, Lenny - plainly turned on by her cheerful carnality - tries to tidy up her life, an enterprise which drags him into assorted tangles with a murderous pimp and a boxer even less nimble-witted than Linda. Undemanding as the ensuing comedy may be, it's also much less suffocating than a lot of Allen's previous excursions - a welcome gift to those who think he cuts a better figure as Yorick than as Hamlet.John Woo, the Hong Kong shoot-'em-up director turned Hollywood shoot- 'em-up director, used to be noted for insisting on individual bangs for each of his characters' guns. "Rupert said that the stories that were told through the characters were the ones he found the most compelling But he liked all four stories - he made that very clear It was a very enthusiastic response. "I think tabloid is lively - and I would like to have seen us do something more lively, more spirited and playful." He stared gloomily out of his window at the midtown skyscrapers. "It's imperative for us to find a way for this show to be buoyant," he said.

"'Buoyant' is a word I would really stress."Everyone was somewhat surprised when Corvo and Neil returned from Los Angeles, bearing the happy news that Murdoch loved the show and wanted it broadcast as soon as possible. According to Corvo, it was one of the most unequivocally positive responses to a pilot he had ever witnessed. The vivid assaults on received opinion that had been promised were nowhere to be seen.Instead of wanting to clarify and strengthen the "contrarian" theme, however, the executive response focused on injecting more "soft" into the mix. The show's problem, David Corvo told me, was a lack of "fun" items. "People thought the show wasn't warm enough - that it was a little too aggressive, a little too serious and sombre," he said. "Look," he added a little later, "we're all a bunch of whores in the end There is pressure. When I started out at NBC years ago, the news division lost $100 million a year, but RCA owned us and they saw a news service as their civic responsibility They took the loss as the cost of their licence It was the same attitude over at CBS and ABC.

But news has to make money now, and inevitably journalism has suffered."When I spoke to Dan Cooper, he felt that, in the final analysis, all the brave talk of eschewing tabloid values had been unhelpful "If you want to know the truth, I like tabloid," he said. The ACLU story was the only item that proposed a distinct point of view but even this seemed less "controversial" than obscurely het-up in tone. No one watching this show would have guessed that the guiding principle of its executive producer had been provocation and iconoclasm. It's a general stiffness in manner and speech." The staff reaction was largely one of disappointment. "The consensus here," said one of the show's executives, "is that the pilot was not particularly strong. To be candid, I would say there was a feeling it was mediocre." Perhaps the most striking thing about the pilot was how little impact Neil's contrarian idea had made on the finished product.

"Judith," Kyle Good said tactfully, "has got some work to do on presentation."The editing of the pilot took up most of September. As soon as it was complete, a copy was sent to Murdoch in Los Angeles, and shortly afterwards Neil and Corvo flew out to receive his comment. In the manner of all dress rehearsals, the Full Disclosure pilot was an awkward, nervy affair Both Neil and Regan had proved rather wooden. "The general feeling," one member of the show's senior staff told me, "is that the anchors are not ready for TV, and we're grateful for the opportunity to try and work with that. Nobody in the control room was very keen on the way Regan read. It was felt that she sounded too stiff, that she was emphasising the wrong words, that she wasn't "allowing her charisma to translate". Underlinings were added to the autocue script so that Regan would know where to stress.