On TV

Egypt: The Pharaoh And The Showman (BBC1)

TESS is shopping at the supermarket with her two children. "I want Golden Wheat," says the eldest, Heather. They don't have that particular cereal, her mother tells her, so she'll have to make do with something else. "I want Golden Wheat," Heather demands again.

Tess deposits a packet of something else in her shopping trolley and moves off. When she looks round she sees her daughter ripping open packet after packet of cereal and tipping the contents on the floor.

Here we go again, another TV programme about badly behaved children. Child Of Mine would take more than Supernanny or Brat Camp to sort out. Heather has the look of a devil child. An exorcist might be more suitable.

Whatever you do, don't ask Tess for advice. She may be a child psychologist but is hopeless dealing with her newly-adopted daughter.

Desperate for children, she and husband Alfie buy two daughters from an agency in Canada. Back home in England, Heather's behaviour causes Tess to come to believe the child killed her mother.

"You should stop being a psychotherapist and start being a mum," a colleague tells her. This is the best advice she could get because she's clearly a rotten shrink. One, it emerges, who tried to commit suicide because she was distressed after IVF treatment failed.

Child Of Mine was a fairly ludicrous thriller that saw Tess flee her nagging mother-in-law (Sylvia Syms at full throttle) and take Heather back to the scene of her mother's murder in a bid to trigger her memory, action that ended in a bloodbath.

Joanne Whalley looked suitably distraught at tortured Tess, while Adrian Dunbar's Alfie could only stand by looking worried and being asked "What's it all about, Alfie?"

Just as Tess seemed emotionally unfit to be a child shrink, so Giovanni Belzoni was "the most unlikely Egyptologist the world has ever seen".

He was a hard-up sideshow strongman who ended up in Egypt where he took on the task of transporting a very large, very heavy statue of a pharaoh's head to England.

The idea was to give it to the British Museum as the start of a national collection (of antiquities that didn't belong to them, you could add).

Belzoni - or The Patagonian Samson, as he was known in showman circles - had some engineering knowledge which was useful in moving the giant head of Ramesses, although it wasn't that skill but threats and guns that persuaded the local bigwig to provide him with labour for the job.

Running parallel with Belzoni's story - because this is a history programme, after all - were flashbacks to the life and times of Ramesses II. He received his first harem at 15. This wasn't just royal decadence but a need to provide an heir. Ramesses certainly did the job, producing ten sons and two daughters by the time he was 25. That's known as taking your royal duties very seriously indeed.

"Did you ever see such a thing?" asked Belzoni - not when he looked in the mirror at his amazing beard but at the magnificent buried temples of Abu Simbel.

Even more amazing was the knowledge that behind the beard was Matthew Kelly, late of Stars In Their Eyes. "Tonight, Matthew," he could have said to himself, "I'm going to be an Egyptologist."