Locked Up Abroad: Saddam’s Iraq 10 p.m., National Geographic
This series is both terrifying and amusing. It’s terrifying to hear tales of going to jail in a foreign country. The alienation and fear sound excruciating. And it’s amusing to watch the show’s re-creations, which are always a little kitschy and poorly acted. Tonight’s episode is about contractors who were held in a Baghdad prison in 1990, where they heard other inmates getting tortured to death.
Trapeze 8 p.m., TCM
Carol Reed directed a number of extraordinary movies, including “The Fallen Idol,’’ “The Third Man,’’ and “Oliver!’’ This one from 1956 is a not terribly extraordinary circus movie with a charged love triangle involving Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lollobrigida. It’s a strange mixture of heavy-handed metaphors, clichéd characters, subliminal sexuality, and circus atmosphere, as I recall, but it did set up Lancaster and Curtis for their spectacular work in “Sweet Smell of Success’’ in 1957.
