EITHER someone at EASTENDERS (BBC1) has been watching too many Clint Eastwood films, or they really have decided to write Dirty Den as an East End gunslinger.

All that was missing as he returned to Albert Square from sorting out "a bit of business" on the Costa Del Crime, was a poncho and chewed cheroot.

Most people come back from Spain with a donkey and a sombrero and clinking carrier bags. Not Den. He just brings back bags of attitude.

The fact that he returned at all is stretching credibility. Who'd swap San Miguel and the white coast, for weekly rows in The Vic and April showers?

And can you imagine Den's postcards?

"Ere, you lot. Wotcha doin? I might be havin' a nice time in a top otel but it's got absolutely naffin to do with you, allroight? So don't go shartin yer mouth off abaht where oi am, gorrit?"

When he first returned last year, I said Den seemed to have been rewritten as some sort of shadowy vigilante righting wrongs across the concrete prairies. It wasn't just a blip.

Like a true cowboy, Den doesn't do conversation. Unless it involves terse one-liners, answering every question with a question, and a couple of princesses' thrown in.

But I am glad to see the person who writes Phil Mitchell hasn't been put out of job just because the hairy tomato is now banged up.

Conveniently overlooked in the remoulding of Dirty Den as Mr Hardman, is the fact he once had a poodle called Roly. Not the sort of information you'd want reaching the top table at the East End Federation of Crime Lords, if we're being honest.

And quite how much longer Sharon can accurately be called princess' is debatable.

Last week she even uttered the immortal words: "Don't worry, everything will be fine."

This is EastEnders, love, it never turns out nice again.

But credit where credit's due, when EastEnders gets its teeth into some topics, it has few worthy rivals. The storyline about Good Guy Gus trying to convince his bad brother Juley not to get dragged into gang culture, hit the mark. Realistically-written and socially topical, both have put in superb performances.

I was intending to do a review on AMNESIA (ITV) but forgot it was on.

That's the bad joke out of the way early.

I don't usually have the commitment for two-part dramas over consecutive nights, especially not those about detectives.

But with John Hannah in the lead role, the excuse had to be better than that. If you didn't see it, Hannah played Mac Stone, a burnt-out detective haunted by the sudden disappearance of his wife on their fifth wedding anniversary.

Also disturbing him, and keeping us in suspense, was his lack of total recall about the fateful night.

Running parallel to his obsession to find his wife was the story of John Dean, who had turned up in a hospital five years previously with head injuries and amnesia.

He too had no recollection of who he was but after some NHS wizardry he didn't have to wait eight months for an appointment he was given a new identity.

During the course of Stone's search to find his missing wife, he discovered Dean was not all he seemed and was, in fact, another person altogether who had killed former wives.

This was different to your average run-of-the-mill serial killer yarn, with Stone himself being implicated in his wife's murder, before the plot finally unravelled.

With sterling support performances from Jemma Redgrave and Jeremy Childs, Amnesia wasn't as forgettable as I thought it might be.