Chance meeting which leads to deadly deeds.

Programme makers are becoming increasingly desperate to disguise the fact that the series may be different but it's the same actors turning up time after time. Some even give the same performance no matter what they're in, but that's the subject of another debate.

Dead Gorgeous put Fay Ripley and Helen McCrory, two actresses who seem to feature in every other TV series in 1940s fashions and have them speak in that clipped, terribly British way of the period in a bid to make us think we were watching something different. We weren't. Even the plot of this thriller was old - a variation on Strangers On A Train in which two people who meet by chance on a rail journey vow to bump off each other's troublesome other half.

Here, in post-Second World War London, Rose (Ripley) is stuck with her ex-RAF hero husband Barry, a boring man with an even duller civil service job and a mistress. His wife is there to look after the house and make sure there's a hot meal on the table when he returns in the evening. "Don't let the stove go out again, it's not as if you have anything else to do," he tells her lovingly.

Rose's old friend Antonia (McCrory) has an equally loveless marriage, only made bearable by her Czech emigre husband Hector's money. "I felt terribly safe snuggled up against his wallet," she says, explaining why she married him. She regrets that London is no longer "stiff with GIs" but has found herself a younger lover (Lloyd Owen).

His announcement that he's off to take up a teaching post in America sparks a murderous chain of events. One husband gets pushed under an underground train, while the other becomes a corpse stored in the largest refridgerator in London in Antonia's kitchen.

Nobody was taking this shenanigans too seriously which is just as well as gritty reality wasn't the production's forte. What it did have in its favour were two actresses clearly enjoying themselves, having a ball dressed up in Forties frocks and hairstyles while trying to dispose of their unloved loved ones.

Moments of black comedy set the tone, notably in the disposing of Hector's lifeless body. First they lug him upstairs. "I've never had to work so hard to get a man into bed," moans Antonia. And then they have to drag him downstairs again. "Typical, he's a bloody nuisance even when he's dead," she says with feeling.