Not Only But Always (C4); Taggart (ITV1): Writing plays about real people is nothing new for Terry Johnson. Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock, Albert Einstein and Sid James have all featured in his previous work.

Not Only But Always found the writer-director turning his attention to the comic duo of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, performers from different backgrounds - one public school, the other working class - who shared an often-uneasy working partnership.

If they'd got along all the time, this would have been a very dull film indeed. This appears to have been one of those relationships best summed up as 'can't live with them, can't live without them'. It was a mixture of love and hate, accentuated by personal and professional jealousy. Not so much collaboration as gladiatorial combat or, looking at it another way, not aggression but comic chemistry.

The story could have been told documentary-style through friends' testimony and old footage but Johnson's method was to bring them to life using actors. Casting a Welshman and an Irishman may have seemed a gamble but Rhys Ifans (Cook) and Aidan McArdle (Moore) created flesh and blood characters who were recognisable, visually and vocally, but more than mere impersonations.

Various other famous people flitted in and out during the course of the action, which followed the pair from the 1960s to Cook's death in 1995. David Frost, Julie Andrews, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Cook's last wife, Lin, were among those featured.

But the focus was firmly on the pair. Moore got fed up with being humiliated by Cook and told him not to belittle him. Cook's reply was typical of their troubled relationship: "I don't feel it's possible to belittle a club-footed dwarf whose only talent is to play Chopsticks in the style of Debussy".

With Cook's drinking taking its toll, his partner complained he never knew what he was going to get on stage. Cook answer was simple: "I never forget my lines, I merely try to improve them."

Taggart returned for a new series without trying to improve on its established formula. This is still Glasgow detectives solving a string of murders. Over the years, the method of disposing of corpses has become much more pleasant. In Saints and Sinners, they were shot at point blank range and left. How I longed for the days when Taggart villains shoved victims in the mixing machine making haggis.

Episode 66 of the long-running police series, which has survived the death of its title character, was a rather ordinary affair. If the method of killing was straightforward, the attitude of the first victim's wife wasn't. She greeted police with a smile on her lips. No weeping widow, she was a very merry widow and explained that her husband's devotion to his work had made her a widow for years. Her philosophy was summed up as: "He worked, I spent his money".

The police officers are allowed no private life. The closest we got was lecherous Detective Inspector Robbie Ross staring at the cleavage of the female police pathologist as she leant over to examine a body in a car.

He was, he maintained, looking for clues. You didn't need to be a detective to know that he wouldn't find any where he was looking.

Published: 31/12/2004