Murder In Suburbia (ITV1)

The Last Detective (ITV1)

Tutankhamun Exhumed (C4)

YOU don't need to be Hercule Poirot to recognise that detectives come in all shapes and sizes. Ashurst and Scribbens, the female cops from Murder In Suburbia, long to be Cagney and Lacey but end up behaving more like Laurel and Hardy. They'd be more at home investigating the sale rail at a fashion store than probing the murder of a schoolgirl, found stabbed in a cemetery.

The pupils at the private school up the road had learnt more about witchcraft than their ten times table. A hex doll was found, along with a naked student (male) lying on the bed of one of the chief suspects and strange message scrawled on the wall.

The pair also had to contend with a temporary boss - a hard-drinking, chain-smoking tough 'tec (Claire Higgins coming on strong like The Bill's Gina). She didn't fall under the spell of this horror story of witches and bad exam results.

"Give me serial killers and gangland killings any day of the week," she said, surveying the mayhem caused by raging teenage hormones.

Caroline Catz and Lisa Faulkner play well together as the female detectives in this entertaining, if instantly forgettable, police series. Murder In Suburbia has the advantage of only filling a one-hour time slot and doesn't outstay its welcome.

The Last Detective was 90 minutes and seemed twice as long. The trouble wasn't its policeman hero, Dangerous Davies - created by Leslie Thomas in his novels and played on screen by the always-busy Peter Davison - but a contrived story that failed to convince on any level.

I wanted more of Davison, his dog and his sidekick Sean Hughes, and considerably less of the mystery about a murder and paternity mystery among a group of old college friends. The guest star list was impressive (Niamh Cusack, Stephen Tompkinson, Steve Pemberton, David Calder) although the script gave them little to go on.

What the investigators had to work with in Tutankhamun Exhumed were the remains of the Egyptian boy king who died mysteriously before he was 20. A team of archaeologists and scientists were allowed to indulge in a spot of grave-robbing and remove the body from its tomb to give it a CAT-scan in an effort to find out the cause of death. When his skull was X-rayed in 1968, there were indications that he'd been hit on the back on the head with a blunt object.

The famous pharoah was not looking his best when the golden death mask was removed. He was in pieces. When Howard Carter and his team found Tut in 1922, the body was stuck in the coffin after oils and resins poured over his corpse had turned into a kind of glue. So they cut him into pieces to remove him.

A real life mystery rarely fails to be more gripping that something dreamed up by scriptwriter. And an element of suspense was introduced as the government insisted that Tut be back in his coffin within three hours.

Modern technology could enable a sculptor to make a life-like head of Tut but could it really tell whether he was murdered, killed in an accident or died of natural causes?.

It was such a delicate operation that team leader's plea to "be careful" seemed as necessary as saying "don't trip" to a tightrope walker.

Published: ??/??/2004