Auf Wiedersehen Pet (BBC1); Down To Earth (BBC1); Dalziel And Pascoe (BBC1); SOME things never change.

Like Oz's baggy underpants in Auf Wiedersehen Pet. They first appeared 20 years ago in the original series and there they were making an appearance in the opening scene of the new series.

It's as though the Geordie brickie hasn't changed them in the intervening years. As the old gang returned for a fresh adventure, nothing much had altered. It's like settling down with an old friend. You know what to expect, and writer Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais don't disappoint.

Only the location - once a very rainy North-East - was different. The first episode was occupied with transporting Oz, Neville, Dennis, Barry and the others to sunny Cuba. Seeing Havana for the first time, Bomber declared the place a builder's paradise because "everything looks like it's about to fall down".

After a job in Russia had gone horribly wrong and left them unpaid, the prospect of "money, travel and diplomatic protection" seemed most attractive. Thank goodness for OED - Overseas Estate Development - which looks after the upkeep of British Embassies abroad.

The lads applied for a job and, thanks to Neville being recruited into the secret service, got posted to Cuba. The idea of Neville as our man in Havana seemed a little unlikely, but he took his new undercover role seriously. "Do I need any training?" he asked his M (a woman called Heather).

"Neville, you are not Pierce Brosnan," she replied to her Double-O Geordie.

After his dealings with the Moscow Mafia, Barry was worried about going abroad without his "coping tools" - the therapist he's seeing twice a week in the wake of the break-up of both his marriage and his house (an earthquake in Dudley has made the property unsaleable).

No change either in Down To Earth, which was returned to the BBC's Sunday night feelgood slot. If everyone looks familiar in this series about a townie couple running an organic farm in the country, that's because it's packed with former soap stars.

There was much talk of tractors, cabbages and chemical fertilisers in a slim plot about con artists invading the idyllic rural atmosphere. The main disturbance to the peace and quiet is Granny, who knows a wrong 'un when she sees her. "Fancy car, fancy clothes, two black eyes to go with them - if she's not trouble, I don't know what is," she muttered when Emmerdale/Bad Girls refugee Claire King arrived.

Granny was outraged at finding a packet of condoms in her teenage granddaughter's bedroom. "Those things," she declared, "should only be in a gentleman's bedside drawer".

The secrets in Dalziel And Pascoe were more gruesome. The body of a glamorous American woman was found in the woods near an Army barracks. Two soldiers died during the course of the investigation by odd couple coppers Dalziel and Pascoe (Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan).

Once again, familiar faces caused confusion. Charles Lawson may have been playing a hotel manager, but he'll always be Corrie's Jim Macdonald to most of us.

And when David Soul appeared on the murder scene as an American cop, you could've been forgiven for thinking you'd dropped off and woken up during a re-run of Starsky And Hutch.

Published: 05/01/04