Footballers' Wives (ITV1)

The Family Man (BBC1)

NO sooner had Tanya Turner boarded the aircraft in Footballers' Wives than both she and her seat were in the reclining position. The nuts she wanted with champagne weren't in those fiddly little packets delivered by the flight attendant.

Her radar had picked up a tasty young man and Tanya honed in on her target - Brazil's golden soccer boy Paulo Bardosa.

"I don't do window seats, I have a little problem with heights," she told the stewardess, which we know is a lie because of those high heels she wears.

She fibbed to gain a seat next to Earls Parks' new signing, introducing herself by throwing a glass of champagne in his lap and blaming turbulence. They shared a kiss and then she slept with him, literally, as she nodded off against his shoulder.

Imagine her shock when she found De Wolfe at the door, in the glamorous shape of publisher Eva De Wolfe. She announced herself as Paulo's partner - "as in lover".

As she's played by Joan Collins in full shoulder pad and rich bitch mode, she goes around barking orders down her mobile along the lines of, "make sure security is tighter than Joan Rivers' facelift".

She asks Tanya, "can we drop you somewhere?", clearly wanting to add "from a great height" to the invitation.

She may have met her match in Tanya, who wonders if "maybe he has a fetish for support tights," as she tries to understand what Paulo sees in older women.

Meanwhile, Earls Park captain Tremaine Gidigbi, a man whose name suggests an Italian pudding or a typing error, is marrying Liberty in an over-the-top Egyptian-style wedding. He points out that she'll be Mrs Liberty Gidigbi. "It's a bit of a mouthful," she says, repeating a phrase she's uttered before in other more intimate circumstances.

Tre discovers during the reception that his bride's PA, Ursula, has been taking Liberty behind his back. Now she's making off with the family jewels in lieu of severance pay for unfair dismissal.

We left Paulo sobbing as Eva clasped him to her breast. "I'm sorry, mama," he sobbed, hinting that he really is a mother's boy - which provides a neat link to Tony Marchant's The Family Man, a new drama about making babies that cunningly weaves together half-a-dozen stories of couples desperate to have babies.

The link is Trevor Eve's fertility doctor, first seen celebrating the delivery of his 2,000th baby. "It's the best job in the world to give couples the thing they most want in the world," he declares.

Marchant takes every opportunity to debate the ethics and morals, as well as the practicality, of fertility treatment without sounding like he's preaching.

This being a TV drama, the personal life of Eve's doctor is a mess. His wife has left him and, by the end of the first episode, so have his children after he puts egg collection before home life. Presumably he left them muttering that old commercial tagline about going to work on an egg.