On the cover of this week's Radio Times is a picture of actor Trevor Eve surrounded by babies. He plays Patrick Stowe, a fertility expert, in a new three part series dramatising some of reproductive medicine's ethical dilemmas. “Meet the baby maker,” says the caption. “Should this man play God?”

God got a couple of mentions in the first episode. Stowe jokes that a colleague “used to be a nun but decided she didn't want to do God's work any more, so she went for promotion and started doing mine” (a laboured twist on the old anti-consultant jokes). Later Stowe admits that he can't be God—but by then …