Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile (ITV1)

Battle Of The Boy Bands (C4)

The Legend Of The Tamworth Two (BBC1)

CHANNEL 4 was mean to re-run the 1978 film Death On The Nile two days before ITV1 premiered its lavish new TV version. Whether intended as a tribute to the late Peter Ustinov (playing Hercule Poirot) or a spoiling tactic, I don't know, but it did afford the chance to make comparisons.

The cinema version of murder on a Nile cruise was sunk by an all-star cast fighting for attention and letting matters drag on. The TV film managed to do everything in under two hours, balancing mystery with an amusing rogues' gallery of characters played by familiar TV faces working for the story not their close-ups.

David Suchet's pernickety Poirot presided over the investigation after an American heiress, newly-married to her ex-best friend's fiance, was found shot in her cabin. Several other bodies hit the deck during the course of a cruise that didn't reach Titanic proportions but did prove more fatal to some than Eygpt tummy.

This provided the perfect Easter Monday entertainment with views of both spectacular Egyptian scenery and a boat-load of British eccentrics abroad, coupled with a mystery that, if you'd seen the movie, wasn't a puzzle at all because you knew whodunit already.

There was a gloriously over-the-top novelist from Frances de la Tour, a German doctor from The League of Gentlemen's Steve Pemberton who'd strayed in from 'Allo 'Allo, and an imperious old boot from Judy Parfitt.

Waddling through the corpses was Suchet's impeccably observed Belgian detective with his waxed moustache and analytical mind. How unkind of someone to describe him as a "dwarfish character mincing down the stairs".

Unlike Poirot, Kevin Whately's Wolf in The Legend Of The Tamworth Two was hardly a picture of sartorial elegance with his long hair, scruffy beard and dirty coat. He was recruited to track down Butch and Sundance, a pair of porkers who'd understandably done a runner from the slaughter house.

Jed Mercurio wove a fictionalised tale around the real life tale of two Tamworth pigs whose dash for freedom filled newspapers in 1998.

As well as Wolf - a man alleged to "have killed more animals than Prince Philip" - the pigs were pursued by rival tabloid newspaper editors willing to pay for an exclusive story because they were running out of jokes about hogging the limelight.

No less a knight than Ian McKellen provided the wry commentary for Battle Of The Boy Bands, a light-hearted look at the phenomenon of manufactured, artificial and totally seductive male pop groups. One astute commentator said boy bands were like bubble gum -- great for a time, then it stops tasting good and you want to "gob it out".

The music industry has always cashed in on the appeal of pretty boys. If they could sing and dance a bit as well, so much the better. The rewards can be great. New Kids On The Block, the blueprint for boy bands, made a fortune out of merchandising. In 1990, they grossed 800 million dollars.

This story had it all - sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, egos, anger, insecurity, plus boys behaving badly, spending fortunes, coming out. A few, like Robbie Williams and Justin Timberlake, emerge with solo careers. They are the Tamworth Twos of the pop world. The rest of the boy bands are carved up like unlucky pigs.