Britney and Hitler... going head to head.

THE best moment in the new quiz show Swapheads came when one contestant, Debbie, was asked about Hitler's right hand man. He had, she suggested, a hamster-sounding name. Gerbils, Goebels, geddit. What do you expect when a Britney Spears fan has to answer questions on The Third Reich. "The what?," Debbie asked when told what she'd be answering questions on.

Meanwhile Malcolm, whose specialist subject was The Third Reich, was quizzed on the life and times of Ms Spears. "Oh my God!," was his comment on hearing the news. The unexpected, not to say deliriously wacky teaming of contestants, provides much of the fun of Swapheads. That and seeing Johnny Ball's disembodied head on a video screen asking the questions.

Before that, the two competitors spend nine hours with experts learning about their opponent's subjects. Debbie had the help of a read of a modern European history book and an Imperial War Museum historian. Malcolm had the editor of Go Girl magazine and the teenage webmaster of the largest Britney Spears website.

This looked like it would be a walkover. It didn't seem entirely fair that Debbie had to learn the history of the Second World War in nine hours, especially as her knowledge of Hitler seemed more than a little vague. "He had a small army and tried to invade a few places," was how she summed him up. Surely Malcolm's ignorance of Britney would be easier to put right, the history of pop being less complicated than the history of the world.

But, surprise, surprise, Debbie won - she could name ten countries invaded or acquired by Hitler, whereas Malcolm failed dismally to list ten of Britney's hit singles.

Failure of a different kind was highlighted in Real Crime, which dealt with the catalogue of mistakes in 1975 when teenage heiress Lesley Whittle was kidnapped and held to ransom by - it slowly emerged - a robber and murderer known as the Black Panther.

Police blunders dogged the case, which ended with the discovery of Lesley's body in a shaft beneath a Staffordshire park. The errors ranged from failing to request a news blackout (Lesley's brother found himself in a telephone box surrounded by snapping press photographers when he went to deliver the ransom money) to a search of a park that failed to find obvious pieces of evidence.

Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Booth, from West Mercia Police, led the case soon after being awarded the MBE for solving every one of the 70 murders he'd investigated. He's never got over failing to save Lesley Whittle.

"We let her down, I let her down, I was in charge," he says. Even after the conviction of Donald Neilson, alias The Black Panther, one mystery remains. A witness claimed to have seen a police panda car in the park on the night of the botched ransom handover. That could have spooked Neilson and, Booth believes, led to Lesley's death. Going public with this information made Booth unpopular with fellow police officers, who accused him of disloyalty. While other officers celebrated Neilson's conviction, Booth found himself thrown out of CID and transferred to uniform.