garbled man output

[..mg..]

Hi folks.

On my busybox 1.25.1 setup, 'man' and 'less' are conspiring to mangle 
terminal control commands, like this for 'PAGER=less man bash':

BASH(1)                     General Commands Manual                    BASH(1)



NAME
       bash - GNU Bourne-Again SHell

SYNOPSIS
       bash [options] [command_string | file]

except that I see the '^[' as  a reverse-video '['.


Running 'PAGER=cat man bash' shows the correct formatting, and programs 
like nano and mutt run just fine.  TERM=linux and TERMINFO is the 
correct path to my terminfo database.  

Help?

-mg