Top Ten Egypt (BBC2): Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory: After They Were Famous (ITV1): Inside Australia (five); SOME years ago I took what was described, erroneously I discovered, as "a leisurely tour of Egypt".

It was anything but leisurely as we travelled by coach, train and air to a different sight every day.

Allowing time only to pause to swallow handfuls of bowel-sealing tablets, the hectic schedule reached the point where one of our number rebelled, refusing to leave his seat when the coach pulled up at yet another tourist point. "I don't want to see another bloody temple," he insisted.

Michael Wood's Top Ten Egypt felt like that as he whisked us to his favourite sites in just 60 minutes. You don't need Carol Vorderman's head for figures to work out that means just six minutes for each place. In that time, Wood had to explain the reasons for the choice and leave time for a spot of reconstruction, without which no history programme today is considered complete.

Some choices were obvious (The Great Pyramid, Valley of the Kings) while others fulfilled his promise to surprise. The latter included St Antony's Monastery, the oldest Christian monastery in the world where monks spent eight hours a day doing hard labour - which is how it feels watching those 100 Greatest... shows.

I'm of the opinion that sitting through five hours of such programmes to learn useless information such as the fact that child star Shirley Temple always had 52 curls in her hair (courtesy, this weekend's The 100 Greatest Musicals on C4) is not the best use of anyone's time.

It made you grateful that Wood's Egyptian greatest only extended to only ten places and lasted one hour. The fame of the five children who appeared, 30 years ago, in the film Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory didn't last much longer.

Peter Ostrum, who played Charlie Bucket, turned down a three-film deal and became a vet, administering mainly to cows. Instead of partying with the Hollywood set, he sticks his hand up cows' bums. Some might say there's not much difference.

This was a problem for the makers of this latest After They Were Famous instalment. The youngsters hadn't gone off the rails to become junkies or sex fiends. True, Julie Dawn Cole, who played Veruca Salt, achieved a degree of notoriety through saucy scenes with Christopher Biggins in BBC-TV's costume romp Poldark. "I believe I was the earliest nude, at 7.15, on a Sunday evening," she revealed.

That was the closest any seemingly came to naughtiness. One now works as a tax accountant, another is a financial consultant and a third is a single mother.

Fame of sorts has come to people living in the remote Australian town of Menzies through Angel of the North artist Antony Gormley. Inside Australia told how he persuaded 51 residents to strip off for a full body scan, which he translated into sculptures and positioned on a nearby salt lake.

The town and its people were put on the map by a man they considered "some sort of weirdo" and "a real arty-farty person" when he first put forward the idea. Artist and residents came to an understanding - which is more than I did when Gormley started talking about "the objective mapping of a subjective condition".

Published: 29/12/2003