Celebrity News:

For a while now, it’s been clear that there are, after all, only a finite number of celebrities willing to appear on reality television. As a result, even the first episode of a new series of Celebrity Wife Swap (C4, Sun) featured Neil "Razor" Ruddock and Pete Burns. The narrator dutifully introduced them as an ex-footballer and a pop star. Yet, my guess is most of the audience knew them better from I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and Celebrity Big Brother respectively.

Either way, both men are apparently too famous to do any housework. Pete’s civil partner, Michael, not only acts as his PA and manager, but also cleans the loo and cooks all the meals. Razor’s girlfriend, Leah - as luck would have it, an ex-Page 3 stunner - combines her cleaning duties with single-handedly looking after seven-month-old Pebbles (who, should you be wondering, is a baby girl). When the swap began, Razor had never so much as changed a nappy - although, in his defence, it’s not easy to when you’re in the pub.

As ever, the more cowed partners were paired together, and had a pretty good time. ("I feel like I’ve escaped," said Leah as she returned to a life of clubbing and modelling.) It was therefore left to Pete and Razor to supply the required quotient of arguments.

At which point, I’d quite like to claim that Wife Swap is hopelessly clapped-out and formulaic. Unfortunately, it’s only formulaic - and, once again last night, its formula provided an undeniably entertaining watch.

Pete, of course, played a blinder. To begin with, he was touchingly nervous around the baby - and touchingly exasperated when she wouldn’t go to sleep. ("Come on kid, I need a cigarette.") Eventually, he turned himself into a knowing and mischievous parody of a desperate housewife: complaining about the lack of romance in his life, and barking out "You’ve been drinking" when Razor was late back from the shops.

More surprisingly, this seemed to do the trick. By the end, Razor was repenting of his macho ways, and working on his sensitive side. Not that the learning process was mutual. In the final meeting, Pete dispensed plenty of advice to Leah. Oddly, however, when she suggested that Michael might want a life of his own too, the subject was immediately and firmly closed - presumably because Pete had one big hit in 1984.

Even by its own standards, the latest Marple (ITV1, Sun) was full of star names - which, as it turned out, would cause certain problems. At first, though, everything proceeded normally. In a large, isolated house, a stern matriarch (Jane Seymour) systematically gave various family members a reason to kill her, before being found dead in her study. The police then arrested the most obvious suspect.

In fact, the poor bloke had to wait slightly longer than usual for his innocence to be established - because his alibi wasn’t corroborated for two years, by which time he’d been hanged. Cue Geraldine McEwan in a little hat, rather overdoing the twinkling benevolence…