If... It Was A Woman's World (BBC2): EXCUSE me while I go into the "bitch box". Others call it a sharing space. It looks like a cross between the Tardis and one of those electronic public toilets. You go inside and rant at a screen to let off steam.

Personally, I find screaming and shouting at the box in the corner of the room - the TV set - works well enough. You can get added pleasure if someone you particularly dislike is on the telly at the time.

Come 2020, this speculative drama-documentary suggested, we'll all be needing a bitch box. Or rather, men will. We'll be in such a state by then, as women take over the workplace as well as the home, that we'll need somewhere to get things off our chest.

The If... series takes statistics and expert opinion, then projects the information to come up with a hypothetical situation in the future. The scenario is fiction, but the interviews are real.

Here, the idea was that by 2020 a quiet revolution will have put men and women on equal footing - but not leaving them exactly happy. Men are under threat and are angry. Masculinity is a condition that dare not speak its name. Males are reduced to forming fighting clubs, and playing war games.

Academically out-performing the men, women have moved out of the home and taken over the workplace, leaving men as the menial underdogs. The emotional skills that women possess are what are most in demand as traditionally male-dominated industries decline.

What became clear was that the 2020 scenario depicted is not as unlikely as it might seem at first. For instance, in 1990, one in 12 managers were woman. Now it's one in four. By 2020 it could well be one in two.

The technology is available for older women to have children. Alice, the 52-year-old divorced chief executive officer in If... It Was A Woman's World, was planning to have another child using frozen embryos.

At the moment an older man who fathers a child is considered a bit of a lad, while the idea of an older woman having a baby is considered distasteful or even immoral. Public perception is going to have to change, as people realise that older mothers could have positive benefits.

A fertility expert was on hand to tell us that sperm count in the west is less than half what it was in the 1950s. That many men's count could drop below the threshold to father children is a possibility.

The format of the If... series provides a neat twist for combining an issue-based documentary with a spot of intelligent guesswork. I did get thoroughly confused as to what was fact and what was supposition. But then, I'm only a man, so what else do you expect?

Published: 01/04/2004