THERE WAS a piece in the Guardian the other day, about the actress Francesca Annis. Like so many actors and actresses, Ms Annis is more regularly in the "news" (heaven help us) because of her personal life (i.e. love life) than as a result of her professional career, though of course where today's better-known stars are concerned, these elements now merge seamlessly.

Francesca Annis is currently famous for having left her long-time partner, and father of their three children, to take up with Ralph Fiennes, lust object of about five million women and star of The English Patient, a film, apparently in line for some 764 Oscars, or thereabouts. Annis is 52 and Fiennes is 33.

If you do not know this much already you are quite out of touch with today's popular culture and I am very sorry but can do nothing, for you. Anyway the Guardian article picked up on a Daily Mail article and considered the issue of - as the author described it - "sauce for the goose and jam for the gander".

That's right: the notion that it's deemed socially acceptable for an older man to desert long-term partner and family for a younger woman, but not for an older woman to take off with a younger man.

Notwithstanding the Daily Mail, which featured a slightly aggrieved interview with Ms Annis's former partner, the Guardian article, versions of which seem to feature monthly, is hopelessly dated. It is entirely acceptable these days, and shown to be so throughout the media, for everybody beyond the age of consent to go off with whomsoever they like without the least public disapproval.

But in the ease of the gender/age issue, the tables have turned to the extent that the gander must now be seen to get the truly raw deal.

As it happens, Francesea Annis is currently starring in a television drama series, Reckless (UTV, Thursdays). Set in the incomprehensibly sexy world of TV medicine, it involves a handsome young doctor, Owen Springer (Robson Green), who falls for older management consultant Anna Fairley, who awkwardly happens to be married to Owen's boss, consultant Richard Crane (Michael Kitchen).

Who do you think has been calling the shots from the start of the series? Why, Anna has. Who comes across as a hopeless, spineless, incoherent, foolish, pretentious hypocritical fool? Why, Anna's husband Richard. And who is the bright, handsome, intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful charmer? Why, the youthful Owen.

Are Anna and Owen now madly in love? Well of course they are, do you never watch television drama? Anna's initial rage at inadvertently discovering her husband's infidelity has metamorphosed to mad romantic passion for her new lover. Her rage has, heaven help us, empowered Anna, and there is no stopping her now. After all the wrongs she is in the right.

There is no way you would ever see a TV drama today with these roles reversed for gender.

And are there other details to show what a pig Richard is? Indeed there are. In the first place he is a consultant: in TV-hospital land he is thus straightaway an arrogant and heartless bully. Also, he is having an affair with his secretary, who, on the evidence of the series, has at least five times his intellectual capacity, plus twice his wit, and would clearly do a far better job at the operating table if given the chance.

Last week's episode ended with a ludicrous bout of fisticuffs between Owen and Richard, after which they were both hauled off by the police. It is fairly easy to decode this in TV/media/sex/gender terms as a very poor reflection on both men, and an indicator that their essential childishness will soon be made even more apparent.

Anna's bouts of tearfulness, desperate attempts to get her own way, sheer selfishness and generally wilful behaviour do not of course constitute childishness: they demonstrate her forceful personality, individualism, heartfelt passion and determination to secure her rights. Right?

With Owen's medical colleagues mere cardboard cut-out chauvinists, and his father a clapped-out ex-alcoholic whose efforts at being a husband and father have manifestly failed, the only people portrayed as grown-ups in this series are female.

Sauce for the goose and more, sauce for the goose, that's today's media reality, currently being viewed weekly by an average 12 million people. {CORRECTION} 97030500047