More tosh than Posh

While Footballers' Wives enjoy playing away, the limp legal eagles of Trust can't leave the office behind

Footballers' Wives ITV
Trust BBC1
Red Cap BBC1
Taken BBC2
Wife Swap C4

What a week for flashbacks. There was Footballers' Wives, of course, set in a parallel Britain where the sunlight sparkles ceaselessly on kidney-shaped pools and glasses of pink champagne, where people say things like: 'Your paps were leaking milk, Jacks!' and 'Are you trying to give me a brain tumour?' and 'Wormwood Scrubs, babe. Fancy it?' and 'I must warn you, there is some staining.'

It is a slapdash affair, Footballers' Wives: in the opening titles, the apostrophe has been mislaid along with the good taste, and the actor playing Jason habitually puts the emphasis in the wrong place (Tanya: 'We DID put him in a coma.' Jase: 'Uh, correction, you put him in a COMA, Mother Teresa'). But there's always space in my sitting room for a bargain-bin Dynasty, even if the storylines are now so outlandish that they overlap with redtop reality (corpses in the deep end, Beckham kidnap plots). And then, oh lordy, there was Trust.

Clouds scudding across glass-fronted skyscrapers! Suits pouring out of Underground stations! Boardrooms! Wine bars! If you, too, have fond memories of Capital City, a barmy drama about red braces and red faces on a London trading floor (a series that, like its characters, was made cruelly redundant by the recession of the early Nineties), then Trust will plug the Capital City -sized hole that you never knew your life had.

Quite why so many of us feel the need to come home from the office and then watch it on telly is one of life's great mysteries, and the first episode of Trust certainly contained far too many references to broken photocopiers and company credit cards to qualify as proper escapism. Its writer, Simon Block, who did such a smart job with the shortlived North Square - a drama about a barristers' chambers which fell short of the necessary glamour only because it was set in Leeds and featured a male lead who was too blond - had his work cut out here. Could he persuade the viewer to overcome a new set of prejudices? Nothing, on the face of it, could be more deathly dull and revolting than the life of the cashed-up corporate lawyer. So it was fortunate that Trust followed the advice given by Stephen Bradley (the ubiquitous Robson Green, playing yet another screw-up touched by genius) to his intern: 'Put the people first and the law second.'

Naturally, Bradley is unable to follow his own advice since he is a workaholic who overnights in his swivel chair, cutting flirty deals with America, and is put together every morning by a nice lady from Jeeves of Belgravia who even applies his deodorant (let's hope she applies several layers, and some Gold Spot, because he stands much too close to people in the lift). His habit of referring to his colleagues as 'family' is, unsurprisingly, jeopardising his relationship with an unseen wife who by the end of this first episode, incensed by yet another apology accompanied by a particularly pitiful gift, had sent his suitcases around in a taxi.

Despite being a man so lacking in insight that he thinks a single Belgian truffle more classy than a triple-tier box with silk ribbons, Bradley is held in high regard by his colleagues, including Sarah Parish, doing her usual waspish thing without really moving her upper lip, as a Cherie Blair/Kate Reddy/brilliant-overstretched-working-mum-with-loads-to-prove variant; Chiwetel Ejiofor, from Dirty Pretty Things, as feckless achiever Ashley Carter; and Neil Stuke as the token sorted person who goes home on time every night.

Just in case this wasn't enough to overcome your reservations, the practice has a discreetly radical agenda tailored to the requirements of Observer readers. Ian McShane's Alan Cooper-Fozard (the firm's top banana, whose rather laboured eccentricities include a partiality for mango and Tizer, and big shiny ties) is, you see, the son of the man who laid the legal framework for the NHS: the reason Carter this week was under instruction to do his utmost not to win a PFI-related account. But the lawyerly stuff is pretty incidental here. Mostly it's the usual story, told with unusually snappy efficiency, of well-dressed professionals trying to balance their work and home lives, and getting into a beastly muddle.

At this point, I feel obliged to mention the thrill of stumbling upon two Capital City alumni in the new series of Red Cap, though it's a bit of a shame that I can only put a name to Douglas Hodge. The other, who popped up for the briefest of seconds as a stern, bald man in fatigues, played Max, the transcendental broker - you know, the one with the ponytail. I can't say hand on heart that his Red Cap character wasn't given a namecheck, since the dialogue is relentlessly obscured by machismo: key bits of the plot are lost as soldiers run around shouting and shooting, while big trucks rev and chopper rotors whirr.

With lots of grainy action sequences and sudden sick-making zooms, this is a drama that bears a marked physical similarity to a recruitment ad, a feature that has been relentlessly exploited in Red Cap 's trailers. Indeed, according to an army website, 'each programme shows elements of the regular army in its working environment, providing the army with excellent PR material'. Ha! Since the opening episode featured murder and drug-dealing on a military base in Germany, some top brass may be wishing they could rephrase that. There is the comfort, at least, of knowing that Tamzin Outhwaite is in charge as the Special Investigations Branch's Jo McDonagh (or, as her colleagues call her, without seeming to realise how evocative it sounds, Sergeant Madonna). Outhwaite does the starchy/tough thing well, and only lets herself down when she has to break into a run, at which point she looks rather messy and girly. One of this week's troublemakers turned out to be an army-brat barmaid - a sly reference, surely, to the lead's formative years pulling pints at the Queen Vic. 'Keep the change,' said Outhwaite graciously. 'Five pee? Thanks,' sneered the barmaid.

Taken, a great articulated lorry of a drama from the garage of Steven Spielberg, also used the military as backdrop, but was less about men in khaki than little khaki men. So much happened in the first episode - the abduction of an American aircrew during a Second World War dogfight; the crashing of a flying saucer near Roswell air base; a soft-focus love affair between a lonely housewife and an alien that culminated, eww , in a potting-shed conception - that it proved difficult to work out what on earth, or even Mars, was going on. All the usual Spielberg obsessions were on parade, boots and buckles as shiny as can be. Stranded extraterrestrials, check. The longing to belong, check. The heartlessness of the Powers That Be, check. This is clearly going to be a production in which the words 'mini-series' and 'epic' come in handy, as well as 'overblown', 'intrusive score' and 'really rather dull'.

In Wife Swap, a Teddy-Cam-style documentary about the weird ways in which households organise themselves, two families got the matriarchs that they deserved. In the case of Dave, Mary and Carol, this was Sonia, who reorganised the furniture, emptied the freezer of ready meals, and marched them down the gym. In the case of Lance, Kim and Luke, it was Dee, who was not ornamental in the slightest and only wanted to watch a lot of telly. Dee was racist and dim, but the programme never really squared up to the fact that she, unlike Sonia, seemed to have a full-time job. Self-satisfied Lance, who called Sonia 'my lady', thought it was outrageous that Dee wanted to put her feet up when she got home, instead of mopping floors and cooking his dinner, and indeed much editorial emphasis seemed to be put on the notion that good mums should do all the cooking and the cleaning without much help from anyone.

To be fair, Sonia was great in other ways, too: funny, assured, astute. All in all, much too good for that authoritarian prig Lance, who proposed to her as soon as the experiment was over, having realised just how lucky he was. Dee just knew Dave would hate the fact that Sonia was black, but he hadn't really noticed this, being too busy having the time of his life, or at least the last 18 years. Dave was a man who wanted to be needed, to be included in the household, and the sight of him swelling with pride when Sonia called on him for support as she tackled Mary, the most stubborn stain of them all, was oddly touching.

Their efforts were doomed. Memorably described by her dad as 'a cesspit child', Mary was so badly behaved that neither cattle prod nor tranquilliser dart would have had any effect. Her unspeakable antics provided rich pickings for the cameras - pickings that gave me a bit of a tummy-ache, first from laughing so hard, but then, later, from feeling rather sick about it all.

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