less vs man under a/ux

[Bill Phillips]

I've been trying to get less working on this system, which runs a/ux, and
it seems to work just fine with one exception:  when designated as PAGER,
and called from man, less displays escape sequences as "^[<whatever>",
so you end up with a lot of garbage on the screen, and no highlighting,
underlining or whatever.  I've installed less on several systems and
have never seen this bizarre behavior before.  

Help!

Thanks,
bill