A dead cert to pull in audience: Waking The Dead (BBC1)

This series can hardly go wrong borrowing, as it does, elements from several different cop show formats. We have the forenic expert, the criminal profiler, two younger detectives (one male, one female) and, of course, the leader of the team who thinks he always knows best.

Even the story of Life Sentence, the first of three new two-part crime thrillers, seemed familiar. It's the one about the mastermind who orchestrates fresh crimes from his prison cell in order to cook a snook at the detective who worked on the original case.

No police series would be complete without a gruesome find. Here it was a long-buried corpse. "That looks to me like a human thigh bone," said one policeman picking up what looked like a large chicken drumstick. "But is it Valerie's thigh bone?" asked another.

And yet, this was gripping stuff - mainly because the production was cast up to the hilt with decent actors. Some weren't given an awful lot to do, in Holly Aird's case little more than announcing a DNA match and Claire Goose had merely to provide the feminine bait to trap the guilty party.

Sam West, who looks almost angelic with his curly blond hair, got to display a nasty side as Thomas Rice, a serial kidnapper and killer known as The Gambler because of the playing cards he left at the scene of the crime.

The cold case squad, who investigate crimes that defeated the original inquiry teams, take a fresh interest in Rice when Clare Delaney (Susannah Harker), the only one of his victims who lived to tell the tale, gets a scare from a playing card thrown at her car windscreen one dark night.

Trevor Eve's superintendent looks again into Rice's crimes, to discover that all isn't quite as it seemed at the time. He has the help of profiler Sue Johnson and forensic expert Holly Aird.

Ex-Casualty nurse Claire Goose and Wil Johnson are there as junior detectives to do the leg work while Eve scowls over his personal involvement in the case and Johnson tries to get inside the mind of the killer.

The one thing she couldn't explain was her hair. Or whoever's hair she was wearing on her head. If I'm mistaken and it's real, she should sue her hairdresser - or lend it to Elton John.

Die laughing

Murdered To Death

York Grand Opera House

AGATHA Christie whodunits on stage are so ludicruous, always top heavy with plot at the expense of convincing characters, that the idea of sending up her thriller genre seems unnecessary, not to say impossible. After all, they're funny enough unintentionally without the need to take the mickey on purpose. Yet York-born Peter Gordon's spoof of a country house murder scenario does offer plenty of laughs, even if the joke is wearing a bit thin, having been done to death, by the time the third corpse hits the floor.

The fun at a weekend house party in the 1930s comes to an end when the hostess is shot dead, having taken care to provide everyone present with a motive for killing her in the opening scene. The only person who seems above suspicion is Miss Maple (Anna Karen), a Miss Marplish spinster who leaves dead bodies in her wake wherever she goes.

Nicholas Smith's lugubrious Bunting the butler has some hilarious moments as his servant attempts to curb his naturally exuberant personality, and Geoffrey Davies is a real treat as the blustering, sherry-swigging, foreigner-hating colonel. These are both wonderfully drawn suspects.

Best of all is Trevor Bannister, having enormous fun as Inspector Pratt (no relation!), a policeman so incompetent that he makes Inspector Clouseau look like Hercule Poirot. He has a wonderful time mangling the English language in a way that makes Mrs Malaprop appear sensible, as well as managing to shoot a fellow policeman (former EastEnders actor Richard Elis) with the murder weapon.

This comedy may not be quite what Agatha Christie would have written, but it's a lot more fun than anything she did actually write.

Steve Pratt

l Until Saturday. Tickets (01904) 671818.