Broken dpkg dialogs

[Chris Dean]

I'm having a problem with the dialog boxes that are drawn when I use
dpkg (or apt-get).  All the information is there, but they aren't
being drawn correctly.  There are control characters instead of the
nice lines I'm used to seeing.

I'm ssh-ing in from a Mac, so that could have something to do with it.
I have tried multiple terminal programs on the Mac, and they all work
fine on my plain Debian boxes, and are all broken on my Ubuntu boxes.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Regards,
Chris Dean